write a limerick, win a diamond pendant

Check out Mervis Diamonds' limerick-writing contest. Some details:

The best limerick wins a $500 diamond pendant! The winning entry will be funny, clever, romantic and include the flavor of DC. And additionally, we’ll print our favorite few submissions in our weekly ads in The ONION: each week, a different diamond limerick. What I’d like to do, and the details are yet to be worked out, is host a little happy hour for the winning writers and Ronnie Mervis will do a reading of his favorite pieces. That should be fun!

My favorite entry thus far is this one by Tom Bridge:

There once was a fella named Mervis
Who hocks the stones most imperv’ous
He sold me a rock
and a ring from his stock
and now we’re engag’d and pretty nervous!

I asked a disheveled, impecunious poet who lives in a garret up the street what he thought of this limerick. This is what he said:

Hhhhh. "There once was a fella": conventional, possibly classic. Emmm, early-modern feel with the first rhyme, "imperv'ous". Ah, ah, wonderful, a muscular couplet with stout, single-syllable cadence, that then collapses into a jittery concluding line! [then unintelligible feverish mutterings]

Whatever. Tom, who writes for the excellent We Love DC blog, will surely become bigger than Shakespeare even if he doesn't win the Mervis diamond.