The following is a re-posting of this past Sunday’s edition of Sunday Doodles (Sunday Doodles CXCV), which is normally a perk for $5 and up subscribers to my SubscribeStar Page.  The post serves as a preview, of sorts, to the kind of content that will make up (I hope!) my third book, tentatively entitled Offensive Poems: With Pictures.  I thought I’d bring it to the masses—you, my beloved free subscribers and daily readers—to get feedback—and to let you in on this new project.  —TPP

Typically, Sunday Doodles is reserved for the classy $5 and up subscribers, while $3 a month gets the first Sunday of the month to gawk at doodles.  However, I’m opening this post up to all subscribers.

That’s because this weekend’s edition of Sunday Doodles features a preview of my current book project, Offensive Poems: With Pictures.  This project started almost by accident—I was doodling at an open mic night on Tuesday, 18 July 2023, and started sketching people around me.  Two nights later—Thursday, 20 July 2023—at another open mic, I drew “Cute But Offensive Extraterrestrial”; he prompted me to write the haiku “Learn to Code.”

That got me thinking:  what if I wrote a red-pilled haiku for every doodle?  I was already toying with the idea of writing poems to accompany each doodle, but I wasn’t thinking of making them a satirical commentary on the strange times in which we find ourselves.  Now, I can’t stop coming up with pithy verses about the various sacred cows and empty bromides of our time.  It’s remarkable how many Leftist slogans are seven-syllables, which works great for that second line of each haiku.

Why haiku?  I like the challenge of stating a complex sets of ideas in seventeen syllables.  The structure of a haiku—five syllables in the first and third lines, seven syllables in the second/middle line—means I have to be extremely efficient with words.

And, to be totally honest, I just find haiku easier to work with than other poetic forms.  It offers enough flexibility in terms of rhythm, meter, etc., for a hedge-poet like myself to play around with.  Once I have to worry about iambic pentameter, for example, and stressed and unstressed syllables, it’s a bit too much for yours portly.

That said, I wanted some form, as I find most free verse to be too loose.  There is something to be said for structure, as it forces me to think intentionally about every word.  Also, I find that much free verse quickly becomes indistinguishable from prose.  Much of it seems like prose writing with random or mildly clever line breaks.

So!  Enough rambling.  Let’s get to the doodles!

The first doodle here is, as mentioned, “Cute But Offensive Extraterrestrial.”  I drew him on 20 July 2023 at Lula’s Coffee Company in South Florence, South Carolina.  My phone lock screen is a picture of me and E.T. from Universal Studios, and the young man I was sitting with asked to see it.  That got me thinking, “Hey, I should try to doodle E.T.!”

The result was this rather sallow E.T.-look alike.  I used only the pens and highlighters at my disposal for the coloring; the alien’s jaundiced skin is a combination of a grey-ish blue highlighter I’d brought with me and a classic, bright yellow highlighter I briefly borrowed from another musician.  The extraterrestrial’s hoodie reads, “No Fat Aliens”; the little guy is saying, “Learn to CODE Home!”

“Learn to Code” use to be the rallying cry of Left-wing journalists who were smug about factories and mining jobs shutting down.  When a round of major media layoffs began several years ago, right-wing Twitter uses co-opted the phrase to mock the very same journalists who had celebrated the gutting of America’s industrial sector.  Twitter quickly banned the phrase.

The poem readers as follows:

Learn to Code
“Learn to code,” they said
When the factories shut down.
Turnabout is rough.

The second doodle, “Space Frog,” is from the same time and place.  I just thought it would be funny to draw a weird frog, but the ambiguous blue and pink color palette—not to mention that the subject is an alien frog—got me thinking about Alex Jones’s famous “they’re turning the frogs gay” rant—which turned out to be true.

Here is the accompanying haiku, “Metamorphosis”:

Here is the text in case my handwriting is bad:

Metamorphosis
They turned the frogs gay
They will do the same to us.
Alex Jones was right.

What do you think?  Does this project have legs?  Cosmic frog legs?

Happy Sunday!

—TPP