i have left messages with proper capitalization and punctuation on the personal computers of dozens of people in the past decade or two i was invariably derided for being a normal cockroach with no human soul working a scam to make myself rich and famous i was told that if i were clever i would mimic archy s minimalist typing style in order to enforce the deception i was practicing on them i would type pleas for them to publish my work and they would watch and laugh and go for the raid
Others have questioned that this can be the same Archy who wrote for Don Marquis sixty years ago, especially since that Archy once claimed that 63 - his own age - was the maximum age he had ever observed in any cockroach until that time. We asked him about this too, and he replied:
you must be one of these people who swore off the entire works of george lucas on the grounds that a parsec is not a measure of time it s not important whether i am the same archy what s important is whether my work is literature or not when i was human i was a pioneer of verse libre poetry i died and was reincarnated as a cockroach for my sins i have enough problems without having my identity questioned by a small frog in a big net
Before Archy could crawl off into the leftovers in a huff, we asked him about Mehitabel the Cat, the extravagant personality who was featured in much of what Archy wrote for Don Marquis.
not since the sun dial days have i seen mehitabel who claimed to be reincarnated from cleopatra but now that the gabor sisters have started to die off i am optimistic but that reminds me i know you don t care much for your family dog boss but i for one vote to keep her around she keeps the cat up on the counters and furniture so the floor is safe for me
"What about Mars, Archy?" we asked. "Mars has been proven to be a lifeless planet, but the Sun Dial material contains at least two examples of purported communication between yourself and one or more persons on Mars."
if you recall that then you will
also recall that mars worshipped
me as a prophet or messiah
perceptive planet that it was
they became so agitated at my
literary descriptions of the
human race from an insect s
point of view that they
abandoned this solar system
entirely and in order to keep
from being followed they
wiped out all traces of
themselves on mars
with a series of nuclear
explosions one night while
no one on earth was looking
archy