During the crazy week and a half that I was back in the states (after 8 months of being in Australia), I took a break from launching products and speaking at conferences to attend the Makers Faire with my old uni buddies from Los Angeles. The Faire was awesome - arts and crafts, fire-breathing objects, corn dogs, rockets, bicycle bands, sno cones, massive mouse traps, everything you could ever want in an amusement park for geeks. One of the really random things we encountered was a guy sitting under a tree, with a sign that said "POEM STORE: Your topic, Your price." That seemed like the coolest promise ever, so my friend Diana approached him and commissioned a poem on my behalf - about my hair. After I gave him a 2-minute recent history of my hair, he quickly typed up this on an old-school typewriter...
sky blue
but nights
falling down
the plummets
spectrum doesn't
cover everything
but it does make
it darker than it
was last once weekly
dying now we survived
our out last dead protein
goes DEEP
..which I think is awesome, even if I don't get all of it. We chatted with him more, and found out that he had offered the same service outside Google I/O, and that "web people gobble it up." Well, fine, we do. :) His name is Zach Houston, and he's always looking for more places to show up. Shoot him an email if you've got a poem-hungry crowd at your disposal.