Bob's Angry Rants

I've been poking around Diaryland, looking at other diaries and I am somewhat disquieted.

First of all... are there any other straight men over 25 here? It seems to me like the vast majority of diaries belong to teenagers, women and gay men. Maybe all the straight men are over at Diary-X, which certainly does sound more masculine, or at least androgynous. Diaryland also has those pastel colors and flowers on the main page, which may turn off some guys, too, I guess.

The other thing that is unsettling is the amount of crappy-ass poetry out there. No offense to any budding poets out there, but some of this stuff is just god-awful. There seem to be two major schools of bad poetry out there. One is the "I'm so artistic and sensitive that I need to write poetry so everyone else realizes how amazing I am" school. The other is the "I'm a teenager, no one understands me, and I'm so alone so I'm going to be mopey and melodramatic" school. Both seem to enjoy blank verse as a medium. This just exacerbates an already bad situation. I wish that they would all just write limericks. It may not be the best form for expressing self-loathing, but I would get a kick out of it.

At gym today we all picked teams.
It was just as bad as it seems.
I got picked last
I stare into the crevasse
Of my empty and broken dreams

To all bad poets everywhere:

WRITING WITHOUT PUNCTUATION OR CAPITAL LETTERS DOES NOT MAKE IT POETRY! It just makes it pretentious. Also, a lack of rhyming and meter doesn't make it blank verse, either.

Now, I can't stop you from writing bad poetry, and I can't even stop you from putting in the public eye (which is a detriment both to you and the public, believe me), so I beseech you in your own language:

"Ode To A Crappy Poem"

please

stop writing this

crap you call poetry

it

is hurting

my eyes and

damaging

my brain I beg

you

to stop