My title is, in full, a text message received from a correspondent in early morning with no context. I read it silently then more attentively aloud. With growing alarm I realized it was a perfect dactylic pentameter.

Rubbing sleep from my eyes I laughed bitterly. My correspondent, I surmised, had been infected with the doggerel virus I carry. No one is safe from me, I brooded.

I do my utmost to confine my speech and writing to prose, yet the malign affliction will out itself in verses one way or another. Usually they are mine and easily dismissed; it’s concerning when the contagion leaps across space and time from me to an unsuspecting interlocutor who themselves suffers a verse eruption.

The hoped for outcome is that my fears are unfounded, the ominously rhythmic message was accidentally lyrical, related to an exchange about food, and not a symptom of wasting poesy onset.

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