Ode to Spam:
Oh SPAM! Oh SPAM! Gourmet delight!
My food by day, my dreams by night.
To carve, to slice, to dice you up -
pureed in a blender and sipped from a cup.
What shining deity from Olympus knelt
down to the earth and hog butt smelt?
Creating then man’s eternal desire
for swine entrails congealed by fire.
On some corporate farm, a pig has died.
Eyes, tongue, and snout end up inside that cube
of SPAM hidden in the can
I now hold in my trembling hand.
More than mere food, SPAM is for me
a hedonistic expression of gluttonous glee.
Mottled with pork fat, the pink cube engrosses.
My mouth takes it in, my intestine disposes.
Long have my arteries clogged to the sound
of sizzling SPAM when there’s no one around -
furtively chewing or swallowing whole.
Triple bypass by forty, my medical goal.
Other processed meat products I’ve tried or declined
Vienna Sausages, Treet, even pig’s feet in brine.
Though each may be tasty in different ways,
none matches SPAM for gelatinous glaze.
That glistening pinkness beckons me
with gristle, fat, and BHT.
Oh SPAM, my SPAM - the taste, the smell!
The sacred meat product, from Hormel.
Spam is what I always think of when I read Orwells 1984 and he describes the chunks of meat in the “food” Smith and the rest eat in the cafteria.
SPAM!
SPAM Haiku
Blue can of steel
what promise do you hold?
salt flesh so ripe
Can of metal, slick
soft center, so cool, moistening
I yearn for your salt
silent, former pig
one communal awareness
myriad pink bricks
jelly for mortar
seven hundred tins and more
i build a Spam house
my friend pork shoulder
I return to you. this time
i’ve brought mayonnaise
above all others
porcine treat without equal
there is but one Spam
clad in metal, proud
no mere salt-curing for you
you are not bacon
and who dares mock Spam?
you? you? you are not worthy
of one rich pink fleck
Grotesque pinkish mass
In a blue can on a shelf
Quivering alone
Like some spongy rock
A granite, my piece of Spam
In sunlight on my plate
Oh Argentina!
Your little tin of meat soars
Above the pampas
The color of Spam
is natural as the sky:
A block of sunrise
Little slab of meat
In a wash of clear jelly
Now I heat the pan
Oh tin of pink meat
I ponder what you may be:
Snout or ear or feet?
In the cool morning
I fry up a slab of Spam
A dog barks next door
Pink tender morsel
Glistening with salty gel
What the hell is it?
More at http://www.pitt.edu/~blair1/spam-haiku.html