[Joe Crocker]

Joe Crocker (He/She/It)

He writes his stuff and posts it under doors.
His age and sex, his fantasies, are no concern of yours.

His rhymes reflect his humour -- down to earth.
A pamphlet is “forthcoming” but refuses to come fearth.

Winner of the awkward prize, ham-fisted.
Seldom short- or long- but sometimes shopping- or black-listed.

Nominated (driver) for the pushcart.
Buried in your slushpile, self-regarding little upstart.

[Mary Meriam]

I love it, Joe! It made me actually LOL. Did you deliberately omit periods in S2?

[R. Nemo Hill]

Ha!

Nemo

[Tony Barnstone]

It's fun.

Some thoughts:

Why caps? "Down"

Not sure what "Nominated (driver)" means. Some joke there, but I'm not getting it.

"His sex, her age, its fantasies" is a hard lift, as the "its" I guess refers back to "his stuff" on previous line, but I might prefer "their"

"come fearth": funny!

Enjoyed, Tony

[Rick Mullin]

Another thumbs up!
RM

[Joe Crocker]

Thanks for the thumbs-ups. Pleased it struck a chord. I rediscovered these doodles the other day and they made me smile so I rather slapped them up on the website. Hence the sloppy punctuation.

The impulse was to try to write something a bit different in the biography section of poetry journal publications. I rarely enter competitions so don’t have many trophies to parade. I don’t think I could actually use any of these couplets in a genuine biography because that would probably be a little too disrespectful to the journal, but maybe I can find a place for them somewhere.

Thanks for the questions Tony. The He, She and Its in Line 2 was a late addition, trying to add another layer and call back the personal pronoun preference joke at the start. But it does make the line less easy to read and not much will be lost if I stick with male pronouns.

Similarly the last couplet is also slightly tricky to parse meaningfully. I clearly haven’t been nominated for a pushcart prize. But a pushcart needs someone to push or drive it, so I may have been its nominated driver. (It also has echoes to me of when you went out drinking and nominated one of your company to stay sober and drive.)