Working five billion hours
Typing twenty-six letters
Over countless whiskey sours
Wrote the works of William Shakespeare
Harold Robbins, Milton, Blake
And the endless dirty limericks
Of a guy signed "Jake",
Also scribbled out the Bible
In most ancient Aramaic.
Then they lay in jumbled heaps
In soft chaise longues
slupping forty billion onion soups
With long pink tongues.
They mumbled broken phrases
As they lolled upon their chaises
Where they spoke of random error
In a pointed kind of terror
Which harried every letter
On its passage to the page,
So that fate’s fickle finger
Would halt their thoughts to linger
A moment or an age.
So, returning from their couches
In their beastly shuffling slouches,
They crouched upon their stools
With their pens upraised.
At the firing of a gun
Their session has begun
And they dashed off Dashiell Hammett
With a mildly cursed, "Goddamnit".
Thus began their second run
Where they polished off Tolstoy,
Both the man and the boy,
And finished off -- with flourishes,
John Donne!
With the interlarded garbage
Therefore, driven by ennui
Running ninety-nine percent,
Their literary output
couldn’t even pay the rent.
Especially, as they could see,
The works that would outpour
Had authors (mostly classic)
That were written down before.
They flicked on their TV
To distract them from the problems of the day.
Eighty billion fingers snapped
As they saw they could adapt
Their torrential to this voracious medium.
With its capacity gigantic
With an input, both pedantic,
And of inundating overwhelming enervating tedium.
Now the primates are well paid
When their output is assayed --
Ninety-nine percent of awful worthless junk.
It forms the great foundation
For the evenings of a nation
With a monumental appetite for gunk.