poems, postage paid.

There are few words that give a prankster more joy than "postage will be paid by addressee." This unlimited license to disseminate is generally brought to you in the form of the Business Reply Envelope (BRE) included with each of the seventeen credit card solicitations you receive each day.

The challenge faced by the prankster is content: what to send back to maker. You can go the vindictive route, if you don't care for the company, and send back lead slugs or as many nuts and bolts as you can fit in the envelope. If subversion of one sort or another is your game, you can send along Chick Tracts or pornography. Or a serialized compendium of the complete works of Voltaire, as written on rice! My wife, doing time in the mailroom of a financial institution, came across the contents of an ashtray lovingly delivered, post paid. Another idiot sent rat feces. (Folks, there is fine line between puckish zeal and being a total dick. When engaging in this form of prank, the rule of thumb should be "do no harm" or better, "cause no fear" -- emptying all the Sweet N Low from your Dennys table caddy into your Middleborough Platinum Mastercard BRE and sending it off with the thought of "won't they be surprized when they realize it's not anthrax" is not being a conscientious pransker. It's being a dick and, in no small way, a criminal.)

Shower moment: This project was inspired by a friend who collects all his BREs in a little basket by the door and waits for inspiration. If he finds something funny or interesting, he sends it off to a mail processing facility in rural Iowa to be appreciated by someone who is just dying to take a brief break from scanning the secured credit application of another low life. This is an old and harmless prank, but it lacks a certain essence. The other day it came to me while standing in the shower -- poems. Immediately I called my wife from the shower. She was just in the living room, but I didn't want to yell and this was the exact reason I had installed the phone on the bathroom wall. She answered her cell phone, a bit puzzled to see that HOME was calling her. I told her to remember "direct mail poems" and I pronounced "poems" the way that really snooty professional poets do: POE-ems, not the hackish POMES that all y'all try to get away with.

The idea is simple. With each BRE there is also included a letter (that, by the way, is never actually written by the person who signed it). This letter has a lot of words. These word will generally include a number of very exciting and active verbs and some very strong nouns.

Now, if you didn't, you should have, at one point, owned, or at least played with, one of those magnetic poetry kits. It's the collection of words laminated to that weird rubbery magnetic material that you stick on your fridge and rearrange to create passive aggressive verse intended to snub your cohabitants. You have all done this.

Direct Mail Poems work on the same principle. You take the letter accompanying the BRE, you cut it up word by word and you create poems based on the vocabulary available in the letter.

It's more fun if you aschew free verse and construct a poem in a classic style. My first outing I created three haiku. These are more contemporary haiku, and would not wow and haiku master, but they roughly conform to the 5-7-5 format and address (vaguely) a phenomenon. I am working up to creating a villanelle, but I'll likely need to wait for one of those four-page disability cash policy mailers from Physician's Mutual before I have enough words.

If you want to participate, it's easy. Create your own direct mail poetry and, before you mail it off, scan the finished product and e-mail me the image at kmichaelff(at)personalk.com and I will post your poems in a gallery. Remember to have fun, and make sure you have adult supervision when you're cutting up those letters.