"He found me crying / He crew too / We both crode" - Unknown

“He found me crying

He crew too

We both crode.”

Possibly one of the greatest poetic works of our time, this short piece was originally popularized in several TikTok videos showing the emotional tercet printed onto a page and formatted in a way that made it appear as though it was from The Female Embodiment, a famously “bad” poetry collection by author Eliza Grace. 

This famously nonsensical work of literary art is believed to originate on Twitter (X) and other social media platforms. It is often dismissed as poor, meaningless writing, but I took it upon myself to expand my understanding of this poem. 

We begin with the obvious: glaring grammatical mistakes in the form of made-up conjugations of the verb “to cry.” The first line describes a male figure finding the (presumably female) narrator of the poem as she is crying for an unknown reason. “Cry” is conjugated correctly, implying a sense of righteousness and order—even in the narrator’s distraught state. This exposition sets up the idea that before the male subject joins the narrator, she is in an orderly, “normal” place—as shown by the fact that even in a time of sadness, our narrator’s actions are unaffected by any sort of true discord(as arrives later in the poem) and her overarching situation is kept orderly by her stable, controlled, “correct” situation (as represented by the correct grammar).  

As the poem continues, the man’s “proximity” to the narrator becomes closer. By this, I mean that the poem begins with the man being simply an observer. He then begins to do the same action—crying—as the narrator, facilitating the emotional joining in the final line as the two characters come together in their crying. 

As the bond between these characters seemingly becomes stronger, the grammar tells another story. Through the second and third lines, the grammar leaves its righteous form, pulling the narrator out of her stable state. 

As a quick preface, one could argue that “crew” and “crode” are equal amounts of incorrect. It is simply my own argument that the latter is fully malformed (nearly impossible to recognize) while the former is only somewhat out of proper form. If we view the second and third lines through this grammatical interpretation, we see that our narrator’s overall state of mind (represented, by the verb “to cry” itself)  becomes stranger—more unrecognizable and unfamiliar— as their bond, for better or worse, grows. 

From these interpretations of the tercet, we can consider a few more ideas. We see that our narrator is likely a woman whose overall state gets further out of hand as a man enters her life. Due to the role of grammar in any interpretation of the poem, we can infer that our narrator is a writer conveying the continued decay of order by allowing simple conjugations—which she is certainly used to—to decay, clarifying the sense of things falling apart that can be interpreted from the poem. Not only may she be a writer, but we can presume that she is the author of the poem (rather than simply the subject being described by another author in our real world). 

However, we are left with more questions. Why was the narrator crying? Possibly her state in the beginning is not meant to be interpreted so deeply—one could argue that her crying was a normal part of a normal life, and the real emotional conflict begins when the unknown man enters her life. As for the man, who is he? What are his motives? How does he feel?

It may be impossible to know—but nevertheless, the poem exists. Nevertheless, there is something to glean from it. We must consider this writing as the literature it is, and—

Actually, you know what? Writing this is kind of burning me out. 

Sorry, I’m just finally able to use my computer after days of trying to fix a wi-fi router. I need to write something to submit as on-time as possible. I was on Twitter and I saw someone post about this… “poem?” Not really a poem. It’s an Internet meme. It’s funny. A Redditor probably wrote it or something—fuck if I know. 

There’s clearly a lot of crap in this post(which was written, to be fair, with the intention of boring and/or confusing any reader who might come at it with a critical and educated mind), so I can’t really be bothered with a closing paragraph. 

If you were invested in the “crew crode” poem, I guess you can take a second to adjust to the abrupt cutoff (or imagine I finished a bad mini-essay with an incredible, fabulous, fully sensical point)? 

Just do what you need to do. Pretend it made sense. Give us an A (please).

And stay off Twitter.

            - Oona