• use common/cliché rhymes, like “love” with “up above”
• tell a lot, but don’t show with moments or specific details
• awkwardly rearrange grammar to fit a rhyme, especially reversing subject and object order (“with you I long to be”)
• are achingly personal, yet express deep painful emotions entirely through clichés
• show either how much you hurt, so all a person reading it can say is “damn, that sucks,” or
• how in love you are, without revealing one original specific detail about your boy/girlfriend
• repeat words for dramatic effect (“we were lost, lost on an island…”)
• set up a rhythm, then have a line go many syllables too long but still rhyme
• are pseudo-deep (mention “shades of gray”)
Note: bad poems can feel good to write: they help you vent. So go ahead. Just know that when you share them, they are therapy more than poetry.
| Oh, the pain of how you broke, broke my heart I liked you much but you don’t care
Instead you ditched me before prom
I wore some flowers in my hair
That itched because you I got them from
But it was good I had flowers my lonely prom to bring
Because you made me feel like dirt
My heart you broke, broke like a broken thing
Like a clock or a parking meter or a ripped shirt
The knife you stuck in my heart, my aching heart,
shone like bling bling
But it really really really really hurt. --Mya Hartabroka | I love you You make me feel so good
Like nobody else
So happy
I’m so into you
I love you so much
So much it hurts
But the pain feels good
Good because it’s you I feel
I love your eyes, your hair, The way you do
the things you do
I love everything about you
The way you dress,
the way you look at me
I just love you so much
It’s freaking unbelievable
Ouch! Ouch! Much! Much!
Me love! You! You! --Drippy Drivel |
| Broken Love A tear falls down my cheek
my cheek of broken love
My heart is like a waterfall
flooding with broken love
I feel so alone without you
I have no one who understands me
If you were to search me
All you would find is broken love
The flowers are not so sweet
The sky filled with beautiful stars is not so beautiful
My vision is clouded with broken love
My breathing is shallow like a shallow pool
I would drown in my own breath
I cannot swim
I cannot breathe
I am drowning in broken love
Like a dog with no friends lying out in the rain
I am alone with my broken love
I walk
Broken love
I speed walk
Broken love
I canter
Broken love
I run slowly
Broken love
I sprint, I sprint |
I am a Lamb Caught in the Snow
You thought I was stronger, but I am weak
You are weak! No strength to be gentle
You hurt me, I am weak
I am naked in a snow storm screaming
What do I do? What do I do?
You branded my cloudy wool with
Scorching heat of greed and selfishness
You denied my love
I deny your pain-inflicting words
Just a lamb, just a lamb
That's all I am, all that I am
Your jagged icicle words are impaling my heart
How can you do this to me?
Stop this avalanche on my soul
Baah! Baah! Black sheep have you any wool?
I am cold, I am cold. --Emily Seager |
In the following poem, Steve Martin (in his first book, Cruel Shoes) takes a slightly different approach, riffing on the style of pretentious romantic nature poetry, using lots of nonsense lines that sort of seem to mean something.
| Oh Mercy,
The Prose-Poem Tryptch! I
Semblances of spring, I told her, come like
daisies suddenly tumbling winter’s sky.
Doves, I said,
are seen in an instant, carelessly glimpsed.
Histories
tell of moments only, ages strung on unseen
slips of
spider’s silk. Gifts they are, I said. II
Melancholy selves tell several relations of
senseless
involvement in things of myself and things
of the past,
and things much less likely than a summer’s
rain,
or a gaslamp. III
“Oh listen! There are poets on the hill!”
Then turn your head toward skied
sparrows. Say:
“ Poets! lift your arms for us, come in the
meadowed fields with
limbs of saddened noggins! Tell us of corn,
of summer, of crowds,
but most of all, tell us of the bouquets in
your heads!” --Steve Martin |
Below is a nice card (cover, then inside) made by Alex Barry that I think covers one bad poem sentiment pretty well: