Barrelbody

Barrelbody came to the gate—
Too large to squeeze through or to wait.
It was barely too wide,
No room on the side,
And containment would only inflate.

A single attachment so wide
Took three mail servers down when it tried.
The bandwidth was stressed,
The system distressed,
And nothing but rubble remained as collateral died.

When someone mentioned a limit,
Barrelbody swelled to a whimsy.
“You think I won’t grow?
Just tell me to go—”
And swell past the system’s own gimmicky.

The limit got raised, then once more—
Barrelbody swelled to that score.
It balanced the math,
Expanded its path,
Till limits could not hold what it bore.

It tried to compress just once more—
The compressed version blocked the door.
It was twice the size
Squeezed down with a sigh,
And left the mail-server stripped to its core.

The wrapper alone would not fit,
The packaging served not a bit.
The contents so small,
The wrapping so tall,
That space was consumed bit by bit.

Whatever you use to contain,
Barrelbody swells once again.
You mention a lock,
A buffer, a block—
And it bursts through your whole countervein.

No server can hold what it takes,
No protocol limit it makes.
It just keeps on growing,
Forever outflowing,
Till the whole infrastructure breaks.