Nobody sleeps in when there is a five-year-old in the house, and jermielee's "My Baby Cousin 2" turns that familiar misfortune into a small comic ambush. In eight short lines a morning unfolds in order. The cousin sneaks up, pounces, shakes the speaker awake, hauls them downstairs and then, surprisingly, goes quiet in front of the television. The central idea waits in the final line, "I'm so glad he is my cousin," which rewrites everything before it. What sounded like a list of complaints was affection all along.
The poem is built from repetition rather than rhyme. There is no rhyme scheme, and the rhythm comes from the pattern of sentences: "He sneaks," "He jump," "He shakes," "He drags," "He plays." Each one starts with the same pronoun, so the cousin seems to take over the poem just as he takes over the morning. The lines are in chronological order, like a tiny story. The first two run long and breathless, as if the speaker can barely get the pounce onto the page. Then one sentence is split across two lines: "He shakes me like a tamberine / waking me out of my sleep." The break after "tamberine" lets the jangle hang in the air before the consequence arrives.
The similes carry most of the energy. "Like a hunter hunting its" stops on a pronoun, and the prey is never named. That may be a slip, but it works anyway, because the reader silently supplies "me" and feels the stalking. The kangaroo comes next, and the image is clever in an unexpected way. The bed "scream[s] for mercy," so the furniture suffers while the speaker's own discomfort goes unmentioned. It is exaggeration and personification at once, and the joke lets the speaker stay amused instead of annoyed. The tambourine is the only comparison drawn from music rather than animals. It captures what an animal image cannot, the rattling, jolting, noisy quality of being woken by someone who will not stop moving.
The animal images also trace an arc. The cousin begins as a predator, becomes a bouncing marsupial, and ends "as silent as a mice," one of the smallest and quietest creatures there is. Cartoons are the switch. "When the cartoon start" is a short, flat clause, and the change after it is instant. The word "just" in "drags me downstairs just to watch cartoon" is quietly funny too. All that hunting, jumping and shaking is for a very ordinary reward. The poem also suggests, as an inference, that he wants company. He could go alone, but he drags the speaker with him, and the speaker goes.
The voice has a spoken, unpolished quality, with non-standard forms such as "He jump," "the cartoon start," "a mice" and "a 5 years old." I can't know the reasons behind these choices, but they give the poem the sound of someone talking, not composing. The digit "5" has the same effect. It is blunt and factual, like a detail in a report. The line "He plays rough for a 5 years old" is understated: it is a mild grumble, as if the speaker is half complaining and half boasting about how tough he is. Then the last line drops the joking and speaks plainly. The "so" in "so glad" carries real weight because everything before it has been playful exaggeration.
What makes the poem worth reading is how accurately it catches a mixed feeling that most people with younger relatives know. Being woken, jumped on and dragged around is exhausting, yet the speaker's tone never turns bitter. The humour is a form of love, and the complaints are really a way of saying that the cousin matters. The numeral in the title suggests this is one of at least two poems about him, which fits: a cousin this lively would be hard to fit into a single poem.