Three Poems

Jason Kottke recently linked to a poem by Joan Murray about the old white-guy-voting-Republican demographic, titled We Old Dudes:

We old dudes. We

White shoes. We

Golf ball. We

Eat mall. We

Soak teeth. We

Palm Beach; We

Vote red. We

Soon dead.

…and I thought: Wait a minute. That sounds familiar. A little Googling for a half-remembered line of poetry from a high school English textbook got me the poem I wanted, Gwendolyn Brooks’ We Real Cool. It’s about pool-playing dropouts, often presumed to be black and from Chicago, like Brooks herself:

We real cool. We

Left school. We

Lurk late. We

Strike straight. We

Sing sin. We

Thin gin. We

Jazz June. We

Die soon.

…and then I thought that maybe Asian dudes like myself might be feeling a little bit left out, so I decided to compose this poem just for us — We Real Smart:

We real smart. We

Science, not art. We

Not on TV. We

Hack Ruby. We

Eat rice. We

Polite and nice. We

No fool. We

Soon rule.

(While writing the poem, I discovered that the English language doesn’t have enough rhymes for “black Honda Civic“.)