![]() On a manual typewriter, capital letters require two fingers, as does anything on the "shift" part of the keyboard - question marks, exclamation points, underscores. Referring to said reporter as "boss," Archy introduces himself, explaining his reason for no punctuation. From there it is a jumping-from- key-to-key exercise. A number of bruises and bangs later, he works out a way to dive onto keys with his full cockroachy weight, enough to imprint the letter on paper the loaded in the cartridge. Archy considered the machine in its attitude of readiness. A man of habit, at the end of each day he always loaded his typewriter with a clean sheet, bright and white for his next assignment. Why? Because in one of his previous lives he was a free vers poet, an artistic spirit now contained in the body of a cockroach, and finds himself facing the manual typewriter of a newspaper reporter. ![]() (The one I am currently hunting is sonnets to a red-haired lady and famous love affairs.) How can anyone resist this? Written in 1927 by Donald Robert Perry Marquis, it goes something like this:ĭeep on a midnight in a downtown empty office, a cockroach is dying to write. Finally, a book was obtained with minimal loss of blood. ![]() I had to hunt down the book, grabbing vendors by the ankles as they stalked by on Ebay. I was reminded of this love when Archy and Mehitabel showed up on J Mustich's 1000 Book To Read Before You Die. I stumbled across Archy and Mehitabel in junior high, and fell in love. So many good ones, but a couple of my favorite poems:
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