The poem is generally first person and begins with “My name is…”, unless part of a series; series are structured as dialogues.
Cow poems are in strict iambic dimeter.
A cow poem has the scheme *A*A*B*B.
The cow stanza is a 6-line stanza followed by a 2-line ‘punchline’, varying on “I [do the thing]//I lick the [thing]; much like Benadryl Cabbagepatch, the closer the conformity, the better the effect.
Spelling is more-or-less phonetic, especially for vowels, with some exceptions (classical cow poems make exceptions for “I”, notably) and certainly no numbers; the effect is often described as ‘pseudo Chaucerian’. The grammar too is fairly standard.
Or to put it another way
My naym is pome And wen you noe The rouls that mayk My strukchur floe And poeits bend Tou hone ther art
So they’ve already put up the Christmas lights at the local shopping center right and one part of the display are these big festive phrases hung between the buildings; y’know standard stuff like “Believe” and “Wish”-– and for whatever reason, “Ding dong”. But the thing is if you stand on one side of the road half of it is blocked from view so it just looks like someone decided to write “DONG” in massive fuck-off glowing letters and hang it in the middle of the high street and tbh it’s the closest thing to a Christmas miracle I’ve ever seen
