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“.)
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I've long been a fan of that Gwendolyn Brooks poem; the Joan Murray variant is fabulous (especially because of how it exists in implicit diaogue with the original), and I like yours too.
Umm. "Meathead - Mike Stivic" rhymes, right?
That's a tough one, alright.
Sorry, Francis Heaney still pwns you with his version WE LONG BONY DORKS (from his book).
Sorry, but your poem completely missed the point.
You ignored the jazz-like syncopation of "We Real Cool"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_3kF6MGBjzk
^read by Brooks herself
even thematically, you missed the point