Teen Poets Beware

I dare all poets self-proclaimed
To write without these hackneyed words:
Fall, blood, bleeding, broken, maimed,
Wings, feathers, flight, torment, and birds.
Heart, mirror, mask, cut, knife, and chain
Are ancient as tyrannosaurus.
E’er sorrow, tears, cries, screams, and pain—
Have none of you a real thesaurus?
Poetic suff’ring relies not
On angsty words, imagined woe.
Lost love, lost life, loved life forgot;
What of this sorrow do you know?
Suburban schmucks! You brood and sigh
As though you’re all about to die.

Take your cage metaphorical
Your questions rhetorical
Of why no one “understands” your pain.
Spare me self-pitying symbolism,
Blatant, banal masochism,
Platitudinous poems inane.

“Imprisoned, I am a slave to the darkness!”
No, just a slave to your poetry’s starkness.
Original thoughts are not found in your prose,
Just trite expressions of your pretended woes.

“I cry, I weep, I wear this chain.
The cutting blade, the wicked arrow.”
These phrases that are meant to harrow
Are in fact the poet’s bane.

“Doom, tomb, fall, wall, light, plight.”
I’m annoyed with your void,
Your deep symbolic black abyss
Means nothing if you know naught of this.
This eternal blackness of which you dream
Gives your poems a clichéd, pointless theme.

If my meter or lack thereof,
Sporadic lines, barely rhyming,
Doth offend, pray look above;
It’s meant to mock your own poor timing.

If your poems aren’t bleak martyrdom
Then you make a character to which you cling
Beautiful and suffering
To love and pity,
To torture and adore,
Far from witty,
A bloody bore,
Used and broken, or cold, weak, and numb.

All I ask of you and your poetry:
Bear your cross away from me.