The Hack

Free verse poem written as a gift for a friend to commemorate a bizarre and baffling experience.

The Backstory:
My friend's parents' Amazon account was hacked, and—for reasons unknown—the hacker proceeded to order thousands of dollars' worth of cheap miscellany and have all of it sent to one of the saved delivery addresses in the account. Fortunately, Amazon flagged the transactions and canceled them, so her parents were fine…but not before a large number of items had already shipped. Over the next few days, my friend received so many packages that she said her living room looked like an Amazon warehouse. The first few boxes contained packages of Bic pens, and the rest contained a truly absurd quantity of collapsible water bottles, inflatable pool chairs, and ocean-creature-themed portable fans. Amazon didn't make her go through the hassle of returning the items, so she instead went through the hassle of finding places to donate all of them. My friend concluded her humorous tale by lamenting, "The sad thing is I'll never know why. The mystery will haunt me the rest of my life."

Like a river breaching its banks
and flooding into your living room,
the Amazonian storm surge washes in.
Like writing on the wall, the first wave delivers
ink from an unknown hand
to write the omens of the pending inundation.

Overnight, a cardboard rainforest springs up within your walls
but there is not enough water in this flood for your 30 inflatable pool chairs
nor enough to fill your 161 collapsible water bottles
to sustain you as you wade through the corrugated undergrowth,
wielding portable fan blades as makeshift machetes,
trying and failing to divine some meaning in this cataclysm.

Like an encounter with Cthulhu,
the 40 cunning octopi and 18 hapless jellyfish
refuse to yield the secrets of their origin,
and the eldritch horror will haunt you,
formless and unknown,
long after you have cut down the rainforest
and donated the last machete
and spilled the
very
last
drop
of that inexplicable ink.