A related expression: to tom-cat around, which is a verb for a guy that means to be having sex with a lot of women. Example: I can’t go out for dinner with you–I’m a little shy on cash. To be shy on: to not have very much of, perhaps to not have enough of, something. As a noun, a hamper is a receptacle for dirty clothes. To hamper: “to moderate or limit the effect or full exercise of” ( Merriam-Webster). Scroll down to the bottom of the page for an explanation of the words to hamper, to be shy on, and tom cat. Hence “boss,” rather than “Boss.” The Mehitabel in this poem from 1927 is his closest friend, a more-than-a-little-disreputable cat. Being a cockroach and all, he has to type by jumping onto one key at a time since capital letters require you to hold down the Shift key simultaneously, he is not physically capable of producing them. (As a child, that didn’t seem terribly bizarre to me–I wasn’t clear on what vers libre was, but I was in the process of receiving a pretty good Jewish religious education in a very traditional Ashkenazic community, and in such communities it’s not uncommon to believe in reincarnation.) Archy now lives in a newspaper office, where at night he types out messages to Don Marquis (“boss”), a columnist for the New York Evening Sun at the time. La trame: Archy is a cockroach–a cockroach who has been reincarnated as such as punishment for having been a vers libre poet in his previous life. I’m pretty sure that Don Marquis’s archy and mehitabel was the only poetry that I ever read as a kid.
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