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“.)
