Grounds for Complaint
The following poem was taped to the coffee machine at Southeastern Advertising Agency, where I was copy chief, and it brought a very prompt response. Executive Coffee Service didn't clean the machine—they brought us a totally new one! And to think that W.H. Auden said, "Poetry makes nothing happen."
Dear Executive Coffee Service:
Drinking coffee from your machine on the third floor of SEA makes us nervice.
We think it contains some kind of toxin.
We're even afraid that, when we drink it, it might eat its way through our stomach and right down through our legs and out the bottom of our feet and then eat holes in our moxin.
When we fill the machine with just plain water,
It comes out much browner than it oughter,
And, when we also add coffee to it,
The resultant concoction is so potent and so hard to swallow without chewing, you could almost compare toffee to it.
In short, the machine
Is not too clean,
And our cup of java
Resembles molten lava.
Our stomachs and digestive tracts, while to assimilating bathtub gin and unfiltered vodka and unmitigated moonshine are quite suited,
It's us, not our nice pure SEA water, that we want to be polluted,
But your coffee machine on our third floor, of all pro-pollution devices, is the most pollutinest,
And, of all the complaints you've ever received, this poem, or ode, is probably the most high-fallutinest.
But, now that it has wended its way along a rocky road to you,
You can understand it's what was rightly ode to you.
Please clean
The machine.