I Have Been Bettered
Perhaps you've visited my poetry page. The great poets of the world have nothing to fear. My poetry ranges from Kiplingesque rhythmic nothingness ("Judometrics is a science that was pushed upon our country/As the jury pool excuses all increased"), to the disguised personal attacks ("Martians have two noses"), to free verse run rampant ("Porridge rampant in the hay"), to parody ("You play the song in the mix over and over again"), to poorly-expressed serious political thought ("The suicide bomber? No martyr hero be"), to the occasional thing of beauty:

Cheese is green and better you've seen
That cheese is green, always green
You may think that learning's mean
But you must know that cheese is green

Yet I have managed to find a poem that was obviously carefully planned to turn a generation upside down. Remember the Client song "Diary of an 18 Year Old Boy" which was obviously written by a post-18 year old woman? Lines such as "make me tremble" would never be uttered by a true 18 year old boy, who would be more likely to utter something a little more crude.

Well, one of the poets at the Mark Harms website obviously had the same thing in mind. His "Hear Me: The Voice of a Teen" ridicules the whole "internet diary of a teenager" genre with its very first line:

The pulse of indignant despair vomits from your voice.

Some other lines that nearly give the joke away (or maybe they do give the joke away - perhaps everyone realizes what he's up to):

The walls hold custody the wages of tumult deep within the studs.

My hallmark is knotted up into a clenched fist, closed by a voice.

The doldrums have my lips sewn half shut. Who will release me?

And, of course, the oft-repeated line

Tall teeth keep me recoiled.

Harms himself is no slouch at this supposedly serious hilariousness, as the following lines from Origins & Damnation attest:

At the far reaches of the Milkyway galaxy existed, as today, a remarkable series of planets with an idea sun.

With the understanding of time, space and mass, they made the plan to shut down the experiment. By capturing a massive asteroid from the belt between the two worlds, then sending it hurling into mars, Europia's people were able to annihilate all life on mars.

I obviously have some work to do...