Nobody Attaches Any Importance To the Matter

Decommissioned Reification Commission

Issue 37 * Spring 2016

A found poem compiled from random lines at gutenberg.org. A list of words were selected at random, then found within texts online at Project Gutenberg. This is one of many projects by the Decommissioned Reification Commission as part of their quest to find meaning in the midst of confusion.

There was once a poor farm laborer, so poor that all he owned in the world was a hen. I have had one pair in almost constant use for several years; they have been used in the training of five beginners and are still practically uninjured. This is a very curious and a very important coincidence. If one good meal has the power to alter so completely our personalities temporarily, is it then any wonder that constant overfeeding causes everybody to love a fat man? Well, this very harmonious excitation of the organism has brought with it just such an organic reverberation as, the current theory of emotion asserts, must be at the bottom of all our emotional states.

I was a tall, handsome young fellow, squarely and powerfully built, bronzed by the sun and the moon (and even copper-coloured in spots from the effect of the stars), and with a face in which honesty, intelligence, and exceptional brain power were combined with Christianity, simplicity, and modesty. You remember Kipling's bank clerk, who in a previous incarnation had been a Viking, and who might have written tales as good as Kipling's own had he not been so steeped in English literature.

Like many other fathers, the king could refuse his daughter nothing, and besides, she had rejected so many suitors already that he was quite alarmed lest no man should be good enough for her. Marie and her friends greatly increased the number and prosperity of tailors and milliners and candy-dippers and perfume-manufacturers and manicurists and hairdressers and plumed-bird hunters and florists and cab-drivers and Irish lace-makers and Chinese silkworm tenders and violet-and-orris sachet-powder makers and matinée heroes and French nuns who embroider underwear and fur-traders and pearl-divers and other deserving persons, not forgetting the multitudes of Turks who must make nougat or perish. "You pay for those bananas, you big stiff!" squealed Toddles belligerently. "Be off with you, imp." As he began to re-load his gun, the small boys clustered around him, their hands in the pockets of their baggy jeans trousers, their heads inquiringly askew.

It seems almost hopeless merely to appeal to the patriotism of those whose chief aim is to increase their own profits. Indeed, I have considered the present method of transporting those beams and rails of iron through our streets and past our dwellings, without the slightest attempt to modify their shocking din and clangor, a piece of savagery which should at once be made the subject of special legislation looking to the prompt punishment of the perpetrators of the outrage. Really, I wish I'd die while I'm little. Her father nodded his head indifferently. Yes, those two stories would have been better left out; an early paragraph should have been at the end, for it was the summing up; and the illogical conclusion, which had no promise in anything he said before, was weak, to say the least.

"This is one who can speak thunders, and shoot lightnings from her mouth," Buck commented in Apache. But handcuffs were never meant to be hidden.

And from his place by the pillar Ransome gave the little inarticulate murmur he reserved for Winny. (These words convey no meaning.)