Shaun, Shaun,
the leprechaun
– chanted every day.

Never owned,
made forlorn,
even if just child’s play.

Then came punk
– shortened and claimed,
please call me Leper.

Finding my own way,
happily renamed
to something better.

Also was Sol
or sometimes Sunny,
though I never knew why.

Perhaps ironic
as I saw little funny
with clouds filling the sky.

After that
it was back to Shaun,
I was named after a pup!

Contemplating change,
what new name worn
that might improve my luck?

Into a new world
I became Smithers –
a name I simply hated

Secretary to a Mr Burns
who gave me shivers,
with his energy created.

Once online
I was kabukiboy
for my love of Mack’s Kabuki.

My pseudonym,
I did enjoy
the freedom of anonymity.

Finally,
It’s tenzenmen –
a moniker of many years.

A name for everything,
I began again
whenever inspiration appears.

Written for GloPoWriMo 2026 Day 21:
Write a poem in which you muse on your name and nicknames you’ve been given.

“Shaun, Shaun the leprechaun,” was the name Paul and George, lodgers in my early childhood home, gave me and I didn’t like it much, though not entirely sure why. Maybe it was explained to me that leprechauns had a negative connotation. Thinking about all this now, they also called me Gaun, after a pre-school friend who hadn’t learnt how to pronounce ‘sh’ yet.
When I got turned onto punk, it was the thing to have a punk name, and so, remembering the above, I shortened it to the punk-appropriate Leper. I kept at it for a couple of years but the nicknames one tries to introduce themselves never really catch on.
Sol and Sunny was a name some older girls in middle school gave me, though, again, I don’t know where it came from at all.
Starting work life in the UK, I don’t think I got any nicknames given here, which is quite surprising considering it was a male-dominated office where ribbing and playing were a given. This was when I discovered that my dad had named me after the dog that was the mascot of the Irish Guards, where he was a member.
Moving to Australia and finding a job there, I suddenly acquired a new nickname. The job I applied for was as an IT tech support but because I was the new guy, I was also seconded for the mornings to do the secretarial work for the manager, who was a real pain in the ass. Hence the nickname Smithers from The Simpsons. It really felt demeaning and I hated it.
With the introduction of the internet, it was a chance to be reborn and hide behind a pseudonym and as I had gotten back into comic collecting again, really loving David Mack’s Kabuki stories, I started with kabuki but that soon evolved to kabukiboy.
Before moving to Australia, I had released a noise album under the moniker of tenzenmen and when I got back into music making and then running a record label, I decided that from that point onwards I would use the non-de-plume of tenzenmen for whatever I was working on, whether it was music, production, poetry or publishing.