Bad Poetry Mode #1: I'm so sensitive, I can barely put my pants on in the morning...

We can be honest here. Poetry has a bad reputation. To
many, if not most, poetry is regarded as a hobby for the
worst sort of mewling, narcissistic pale people. Because
of their emotional inadequacies and ludicrous self-regard,
the idea goes, these trembling and preposterous souls must
take revenge on the cold, unfeeling world in the only way
they know how–by writing badly about it. Here language is
not used as a tool to provoke feeling, it instead becomes the
feeblest weapon ever wielded against the subtlest insults
ever endured. Aspirin for the sad spirits of the ego-damaged,
bedsit set, in other words.

It is great fun to write this kind of thing. It is not particularly
difficult either, once you get the hang of it. The following came
to me halfway through a fifteen minute break at work:

I Too Have A Wound
by Kevin-M

It is not easy
Feeling as deeply as I do
When I find myself
Night after night after night
In the company of uncaring women

Who, through their stony appraisals
Make a mockery of my gentle heart
And return my oceanic kindness
In ungrateful sighs and cold glances
Like drunken courtesans in an alley

Behind the palace of glory
In which we shall dwell
You and I, forevermore
As long as you have the courage
To abandon those friends I don’t like

Especially that Darlene, who I fear
Has spread far and wide
A rumor regarding my private places
Which is, I must say
Atrocious, foul, and completely untrue

Oh, listen again to my impassioned weeping!
Which pours forth like salt
From the shaker of my soul
And then can you truly not understand
That I too have a wound?

Deep and prickly and throbbing
As are the lillies on a volcano
In Hell
Without your love, it will
Almost definitely become infected

With the hate and cruelty
And unkindness that
Have corrupted so many, my darling
But not us, my darling
As long as you take care to listen to the song

Being sung behind my crying eyes
Like a bird that soars
Through a violent westward storm
Or a mackerel foundering in a polluted river
Or a lamb, all innocence and softness

Laying down in a field of very sharp stones.