Briareus Writes a Poem

Generally, Yahoo may be relied upon to filter spam, but today,
one spam got through the filter, and I perhaps unwisely
read it. Below the usual subject line, advertising
cheap diet pills (not Viagra this time), I read:
"Like an old soldier, wakeful, in his tent!
And so I gaze avidly
Down the road, at Cypress Gardens, a woman
Against which we have been projected? What . . .
This drizzling three-day January thaw,
And piled up at the base of the columns
In a single floral stroke,
their bellies, they're out cold, instantaneously
XVI. Laying a Ghost: The Jeannette and the Fram
on their own little seat cushions, wearing soft caps
What I have in my hands, these flowers, these shadows,
Away, my songs, must we go
Swaying in unison beneath the snow,
Toward the still dab of white that oscillates
Against this sky no longer of our world.
Left and right, and far ahead in the dusk.
to try that, to hold a terrifying beast
The winged winds, captives of that age-old foe
That desire has ever built, have approached"
This seems to be a ragout of lines of verse harvested from all over the Net--
I've identified one line of Robert Pack
and one of Victor Hugo. I haven't enough ambition to investigate all of them...
The effect is as though the Hechatoncheires, the hundred-handed, fifty-headed
giants of Greek myth, wrote a poem in idiot imitation of their betters.
How like the Web they are--incalculably strong, inarguable, ferocious,
grasping, thoughtless, seizing fragments and bits for a ridiculous
but high-sounding omelette of words. And yet, how like
certain poems by John Ashbery or Leslie Scalapino the result is...