The Limerick That Got Me Detention
It was about the principal, it rhymed perfectly, and it was worth it.
The first poem I ever published had a print run of exactly one copy, taped to the inside of the second floor boys' bathroom door at St. Jude's Secondary School. It stayed up for four days... which in bathroom literature is basically a Pulitzer.
I was thirteen. That year our English teacher, Mrs. Fernandes, read us Edward Lear on a slow, rain-fogged Tuesday, and while the rest of the class slid gently toward sleep, something in my chest sat up straight.
Five lines. Two rhymes. A little wooden box you could hide a firecracker in.
The firecracker, in my case, was about our principal.
Mr. D'Souza was a tall, dry man with a comb-over so committed it deserved its own staff ID card. He gave the morning announcements in a voice like a ceiling fan on its last bearing, and he ended every single one with the same four words: discipline is destiny. He said it the way other men say amen.
You see the problem. You hand a thirteen-year-old a rhyme scheme and a man who says "discipline is destiny" into a crackling microphone every morning, and the fuse is already lit. The limerick wrote itself during math. I merely held the pen and tried to look like I was doing algebra.
I will not reproduce it here in full, partly out of respect for the man and partly because some part of me is still afraid of him. But I can tell you it opened with "There once was a principal, D'Souza," that the fourth line rhymed "ceiling fan" with "feeling, man," and that I sincerely believed, for about seventy-two hours, that it was the finest thing written in English since Shakespeare put his pen down.
I copied it out in my best handwriting, signed it "The Bard of B Block," and taped it inside the bathroom door, the one spot in the building guaranteed a full and captive readership by ten a.m.
By lunch, boys I had never spoken to were reciting it in the corridor. By Thursday someone had copied it onto the back page of a chemistry notebook and it was moving through the school like a cold.
A boy from the year above, a giant who had never once acknowledged my existence, stopped me at the water cooler and said, "You hear about the D'Souza poem?" and I said, very casually, "Bits of it," while my heart conducted a full parade behind my ribs.
This, I have since learned, is the entire addiction of writing.
A stranger carrying your sentence around in their mouth.
On Friday morning the PA crackled and the ceiling fan voice said, "Would the Bard of B Block kindly report to the principal's office."
Note the "kindly." The man was a professional.
I have replayed the walk to that office many times. Forty meters of corridor, every classroom door open, every head turning like sunflowers. I still do not know for certain who gave me up... but I suspect the handwriting. When you have spent an entire school year losing marks for the same crooked capital R, the evidence tends to accumulate against you.
He did not shout.
That was the first surprise. The poem, my original, peeled from the door and flattened, sat on his desk under a glass paperweight, the way other men display photographs of their families. He let me stand there and season in my own fear for a good minute... Then he slid the paper across the desk, tapped it once, and said the sentence that quietly rearranged my life.
"Your third line has eleven syllables. It wants eight. Fix it."
I stared at him. He took off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose, and for a moment the comb-over and the announcements fell away and he was just a tired man in a small office who had clearly read more books than the school library owned.
"A limerick gallops," he said. "Da da DUM, da da DUM. Yours trips over its own slippers in the middle. If you are going to mock a man in verse, boy, you owe him a clean meter. Three days' detention. Bring a pencil."
Detention was held in the geography room, under a map of a country that had changed its name twice since the map was printed. D'Souza ran the Tuesday session himself, which I had not known and which nobody had warned me about, because nobody survives to warn you.
He made me read the limerick aloud and clap the stresses. He made me say "anapest" until I could spell it. Somewhere in the second afternoon it came out, sideways, the way real information always arrives from adults: he had edited his college magazine. He had published two poems in journals nobody remembers. He had kept writing until, in his phrase, life happened, and I did not understand the size of that phrase for another twenty years.
Detention was the first writing workshop I ever attended. The fee was three afternoons of my life, one apology, and a limerick with its shoes properly tied.
He gave me rules. A fresh limerick every day: one about myself, one about the peon's heroic bicycle, one about the monsoon, which he rejected twice for lazy rhymes. And one law above all the others, delivered with the paperweight held up like evidence: "Mock upward, never down. And sign your name. A poem you will not sign is a stone thrown from behind a wall."
On the last afternoon he handed my original back covered in red pencil, as if the poem had been in a fight and lost on points. At the bottom, in small dry letters, one word: "Better."
Nobody teaches you meter at thirteen unless you are very lucky or in serious trouble. I was both at once. These days there are far gentler classrooms for learning to write, ones that do not require you to defame the staff first, and I recommend them, though I cannot pretend my way was not effective.
I kept writing. Of course I kept writing. Once a stranger has recited you at a water cooler there is no going back to civilian life.
Decades on, I still enter a monthly poetry contest the way some men still play Sunday cricket, for the joy and the soreness, and I still count syllables on my fingers like prayer beads. It took me embarrassingly long to write about that school honestly, to write about childhood itself instead of doing impressions of it, and when I finally did, the poem galloped. Da da DUM. He would have found something wrong with it. That is what the red pencil is for.
When he retired, I was twenty-six and living three cities away. I mailed him a limerick. Clean meter, checked four times, and kind this time, which turned out to be much harder. Two weeks later an envelope came back with no letter inside... just a photocopy of my own poem with one comma circled in red and, at the bottom, that same dry word: "Better."
He died two Decembers ago. At the memorial, a man my age whom I had never met leaned over during the speeches and whispered, "You hear about the D'Souza poem?" and I said, "Bits of it," and we both laughed at a volume entirely inappropriate for a memorial... and neither of us apologized.
Discipline is destiny, he told us every morning, and we rolled our eyes every morning, and he was right anyway. He just never mentioned that destiny scans. I count it out on my fingers to this day, and every crooked capital R I write salutes him.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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