“What in the heck is this,” asked the young man’s boss as he snatched up the piece of yellow notepaper upon which his employee had been writing, “a poem about trees and such?”  The man stared down at his recent hire, his mouth slightly open, his head shaking back and forth with some incredulity, before continuing, “Geez, son, I don’t pay you to write poems, do I?  Well… Do I?”

“No, sir,” was the rather meek reply.

“No, I do not,” the older man shook his head again, somewhat sadly, “I’d hate to think that an employee of mine would accept an hourly wage from me, from the goodness of my heart and from my desire to see that person get an opportunity to earn a decent living, to get themselves established in their young life and to get a real chance to make something of themselves, only to then have that person sit at their desk, during paid business hours, and write poems about trees.”

The boy shifted uncomfortably beneath his boss’s hard glare.

“Son, we’re in the limerick business, not the fancy poetry business.  There’s no Laureates here, just honest, hard-working limerick folk,” the older man paused, his eyes locked onto the seated man, who squirmed visibly in his office chair under the withering gaze.  The only sound in the room was a barely audible squeaking noise which came from the dry bearings of the chair’s swivel seat and a slight crinkling from the tightly gripped sheet of paper which contained the troublesome poem.

After a few moments, which seemed almost interminable to the young man, the visage on his employer’s face softened a bit and the tension which had been building in his posture seemed to relax and subside.

He feathered back his graying hair with his free hand and then he placed the now wrinkled piece of paper down on his employee’s desk, made a quick attempt to brush it smooth and then tapped it twice with his fingertips.  After another brief pause, he took a couple of short steps toward a large window which nearly filled one of the walls of the office.

Looking at the world outside he said, “The limerick, son, that’s where we live.  That’s where your mind needs to be twenty-four seven.  That’s where the money is.  T-shirts, buttons, compilation books.  Compilation books!  All ripe venues for a good limerick,” he turned back from the window to see if his words were having the desired effect.

The chastened man sat, eyes downcast, contemplating his desktop.

“Do you want to make some real headway in this business?  Do you want to take that first big step towards the pinnacle, the Brass Ring of the limerick game?  Towards what I call the ‘Nantucket Heights’?”

A slow nod, ‘yes,’ without looking up.

“Then I’ll tell you what to do.  First, you forget all that fancy poetry nonsense, that’s step one.  And then you sit here and you come up with a good, solid word which rhymes with ‘rectum’.  That’s what you do.  That’s what this industry needs,” he paused to let his words sink in, “But I’ll start you off slow, get your creative juices flowing.  So, here’s what I want, I want you to finish up this limerick, okay?”

Another nod, ‘yes’.

“Good.  So, here it is: ‘There once was a girl from Venus…,’ I think you’ll find that the rest basically writes itself.”

The older man stood silent for a short time and then smiled warmly, even fatherly, and he walked slowly away.

After a moment, the figure at the desk reached out and picked up the piece of notepad containing his most recent poetic work.  He brought both his hands together, crumpling the offensive scribbling between them into a small ball which he then dropped numbly into his metal wastebasket.

A single tear ran down his cheek and splashed on the lepidopterous doodle which he had scrawled haphazardly on his desktop calendar and he wrote:

There once was a girl from Venus

Who liked the taste of Earth penis.

She’d suck and she’d lick

On any old dick,

Though she claimed it was just to clean us.