1.21.2003

Found Poetry?


Heading out of my apartment building this morning, I found the common area near my mailbox littered with 15 or 20 scissor-cut slips of paper. I bent down and cocked my head to read, in inkjet-printed type:

nobody got to me about the phone my kid found out

back

I put it in the post office

Say what? Is this some addle-pated haiku? Or, to my disappointment, just some guy's attempt to reunite a man and his telecommunications device?

The nearest post office is four blocks away, but why would you put a lost phone "in" a post office? How would anyone "get to" the man and his kid to reclaim it? ("Get to" as in "irritate"?) Who left this unsigned note, and what good do they imagine this cryptic glyph could do without any identifying marker? And furthermore, what the hell has happened to American English?

I'm not sure what we're glimpsing when we find notes not necessarily intended for us. There's probably some witty anthropological essay to be written, but that sounds like an awful lot of work. Let's leave it this: it's entertaining. The way this Canadian $5 bill scrawled with the words "I had a bad mudder fukin day 2 flat tires" is. Or this parking ticket festooned with expletives and an awkwardly drawn seven-fingered hand flipping the bird. I'm happy just to find it, scratch my head, and move on.


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