Stand up comedian Roy ‘Chubby’ Brown has won the Poet Laureate award for 2018. The controversial blue comic won the coveted prize after one of the competition’s judges discovered one of his poems written on a public toilet wall in Middlesbrough.
Brown said:
I’m thrilled. I never thought a working class comedian like me could have a poem recognised by such a prestigious literary organisation.
It was a happenstance thing really. I used to pen little ditties inside my favourite public toilet cubicle in my home town. I noticed other visitors there had expressed their profound thoughts by using a felt tip pen to write on the walls, and this inspired the poet in me.
From the outset, the competition judge was hoping to unearth another ‘I Wondered Lonely As A Cloud’ by William Wordsworth,’ Do Not Go Gently Into That Good Night’ by Dylan Thomas, or ‘And Did Those Feet In Ancient Time’ by William Blake, so it was sheer random luck that he spotted my poem amongst the public’s untidy cluster of transitory doodles such as:
I want to slam my skanky rod into your slop corridor!
I want to drill my rancid flesh baguette into your sewerage crevice!
And:
I really, really, really want to hammer my filth pipe into your slimy scum dungeon!
CHUBBY’S WINNING POEM – ‘I PICKED A STAR’
***
I gazed up at
the night sky, picked
a star, and wondered
what it meant, and then
as if to tell me it
flickered like a signal – like
a message sent.
This star so
silent, so lonely
lit, and I will never
touch it, but
it touched me and
this is my epiphany –
I don’t know
where the stars were
born or even
why they’re there,
but I think they’re trying
to tell me that
the answers are in
Gladys Sprocket’s fanny hair.
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