The Birth of Beward, Blimey!

I cannot remember exactly when and how it was, but somebody at some time in the past century invented e-mail. And while members of the general public used the new toy to lure naive little girls in the thick of the woods or to circulate ads of penis enlargers, other more enlightened individuals were chatting day and night on esoteric subjects such as Dodo’s bird watching in the Gulf of New Papua or George Papanicolaou’s Pap Test. Rod Dave Summers and me, instead, were getting tired of endlessly discussing Spike Milligan’s misspellings in the Goon Show scripts, so a new technological version of an old loafer’s game was devised out of thin air: let’s write a poem together, one line each, until we get fed up with it. Not a simple love poem, mind you, or a small existentialist haiku, but a whole epic poem, a noisy warmongering Viking saga that would take years to write through snail-mail exchanges, but only kept us busy for a few, em, years with the mighty super speed of e-mail: one line a day keeps the docker at bay (or something along these rhymes).

A Lennon-McCartney collaboration it wasn’t, but pretty jolly smoothly it flowed, my flawed English ironed and chiselled by Rod Dave, the story quickly taking quirky, qwerty and qzerty turns into the historically improbable and the outright obscene. The Surrealists called it the Exquisite Cadaver, we nicknamed it the Necrophorus White Pudding (ain’t as good as it used to be, is it?): we tried to squeeze as many personal obsessions per line as permitted by the laws of decency into tight couplets, triplets, quadrigae, freemason free meters, inept ad libs, never really bothering to check a medieval tome for the true gynaecological treetop of our Nordic hero. We deemed it more important to state how much Bew liked M&M chocolate drops (we all need a sponsor) and to indulge in graphic descriptions of Regal copulations on ice and Lego theme parks. We also cheated a lot, doing more than one line at a time and ripping whole paragraphs from Doom Metal songs and exotic weather forecasts. So how did this bloody Beward saga really begin, for gossip’s sake!? I don’t know.

Vittore Dave Baroni,
4th of July 2006