Greetings, readers of the Tin Soldier and welcome to the Looooooooooooooooooooong Looooooooooooooooong Review. In this, column I write a ridiculously loooooooooong review about something incredibly petty in nature. This week I’ll be writing a looooooooooong review about “Fleas” by Ogden Nash.
“Fleas” is a very intriguing poem. It is the only poem I have ever read that communicates so much in so little. But what is so little? Little is exactly two lines and two words. In fact, here is the poem in its glorious, inexplicable, entirety: “Adam\Had’em.” That’s it! I know you are all shocked and possibly thinking “how in the world is he going to talk about a two word poem?” Well, it is quite easy because what this poem actually means is so ambiguous that we can spend hours upon hours figuring out what exactly I’m going to write about it. Surprise! This article has actually nothing to do with a review of “Fleas” because frankly, it is impossible, regardless of how it would make a certain EIC squirm while trying to “review this shit”. Instead, we are going on an adventure. A quest for knowledge. A quest to find out “what the shit” was going on in Ogden Nash’s head while writing this poem, while, at the same time, still causing that certain EIC to lose her mind.
Our quest begins in the sultry, “shitty smelling”, land of Rye, New York, where Ogden Nash was born in 1902. Nash was an unusual child who loved to rhyme. He is quoted as saying that he “thought in terms of rhyme, and has since [he] was six years old.” This makes sense considering our specimen of a poem, does in fact rhyme. But that’s beside the point. Ogden Nash is strange. This uncanny ability to think in rhymes, rhyme with the times, and rhyme with vines led him to an initial career as a streetcar card ads writer. That brings us to our first possibility: “Fleas” could have been a “shitty” streetcar card ad that he wrote, thought was funny, and published as a poem.
Our quest moves on to Ogden Nash’s death; he died of an infection caused by eating bad coleslaw. What does bad coleslaw have to do with anything? Well, I “sure as shit” don’t know but it is bad, and so far that is what I’m going to run with. In thinking about the title of the poem, “Fleas”, fleas themselves are a “shitty” thing. They cause you to itch, scratch, twitch, and bitch, just like bad coleslaw. Could it be that Ogden Nash was using this poem to actually predict his really “shitty” death? He, himself, could be “Adam” and he definitely “Had’em”, if the “em” refers to bad coleslaw. And that, my friends is our second possibility. Ogden Nash actually wrote this poem because he magically found out how he was “going to shit”.
Now that we have discussed Ogden Nash’s demise, we can actually move on to what the various words in this wonderful poem actually mean. Fleas, as mentioned previously, are pests of the “shitstorm” that we call life. It is especially “shitty” when our pets get them, because then we get them. When you have fleas, you become incredibly itchy and incredibly bitchy. This drives everyone “batshit crazy”. Therefore, the fleas could be a metaphor for driving people “batshit crazy”. But on the other hand, if we go to biblical references, fleas are pestilence and pestilence is a plague. Plagues usually cause a “shitstorm” to those involved and cause society to “go to shit”. Therefore, using natural deduction, we can conclude, contrary to the popular Slipknot song “People=’Shit’”, that Fleas = Shit. What does this mean? It means that Ogden Nash was actually writing about “shit”.
Moving away from the title of the poem, we must venture into the first elusive line, “Adam”. Who exactly is Adam? There are many references to Adam across culture, space, time, and “many shits”. Let’s start with people named Adam. People named Adam have a least four letters in their full name. There are also Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Coincidence? Nope, “I shit you not.” Could Adam have been a predictor for the end of the world in less than a month? Could this be a prediction of the “shitstorm” to hit humanity? Maybe. However, a more plausible suspect is ADAM from the Bioshock universe. Bioshock didn’t exist while Ogden Nash was alive but we have previously concluded that he could be a predictor of the future so “why the shit not?” ADAM, to those that don’t know, is “the raw form of the unstable stem cells harvested and processed from a type of Sea Slug.” ADAM causes people to go “batshit insane”. Also Sea Slugs resemble “little big shits” that seem to occur when you eat some “shitty” food. Hence, we conclude that rather than fleas being “shit”, Slipknot may be right in saying that People do in fact equal “shit”. Therefore, Adam is actually a “shit head”.
The last line of this illustrious poem, “Had’em” has so much meaning it makes “me want to shit.” What exactly is “’em”? Does it refer to the aforementioned fleas? Or does it talk about a multitude of other “shitty” things that someone could have, including a “bad shit”? Referring to the bible once again, the Egyptians definitely “Had’em” when it came to plagues. As we previously concluded, fleas are pestilence and pestilences are plagues. Also since we have proved that fleas are in “fact shit”, we can conclude that “‘em” could be “shit”. This is not a “shitty” explanation as we have already concluded that everything else in this poem is “shit”. Therefore, we have enough pieces of this “mothershitting” puzzle to finally figure out what it could mean.
From all these pieces and we have shown that People = “Shit”, Fleas = “Shit” and “‘em” = “Shit”. As well, we can conclude that because “Adam/”Had’em” that Adam has a “shitload of shit”. By the process of transitivity we can conclude that People = Fleas = ‘em = “Shit” = “Shit” = “Shit”. Therefore, everything is “shit” and this poem is a “shitfest”. What does this mean? Other than the fact that I’m wrestling with demons from my Grade 10 English class, where we did in fact spend a good week discussing the meaning of this incredibly “shitty” poem, we can successfully conclude that this poem is “a load of shit”.
To wrap things up, I hate this poem and I think the EIC and the rest of the IW editorial staff (but especially the EIC) is going to hate me and the poem for this incredible masterpiece that I believe rivals the Epic of Gilgamesh. So to conclude this article like an actual review, I give this poem “a shit of shitty shitstorm proportions” of zeros.
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