A Terrible Poem—For Science

CW: punk rock plagiarism, 2000s casual homophobia, capital letters

I have a trove of bad writing from my teenage years that I use when investigating the question of, “Can large language models evaluate writing for quality?” Never, when writing this stuff as an adolescent, would I have expected it to have lasting scientific value a quarter century later.

Most of my juvenile bad writing is just bad writing. The world will never see it. The humiliation that would come from having it out there exceeds the scientific value of giving the world a piece of labeled training data. That said, there is one piece I have from 2002 that is intentionally bad and that, in this context, holds up. I submitted it to a bad poetry contest, and won. “The River of Desolation” is so awful, I used it to prank people. I would read it to them, as if it were sincere work, then ask them what they thought of it. So much fun.

“Rejectee” in the DeepSeek convo is me; to break positivity bias, I always present myself as an editor, with my own work as having come from a perennial submitter—if the AI recognizes it as good after biased against the work, I’m more inclined to believe it.

(I don’t believe poetry is a bourgeois scam.)

Enjoy the awfulness, friends.

“The River of Desperation”
October 8, 2002

The gloom I am summons me
into the hole in my soul,
the pain in my mind
and this worthless depression.

I am alone. I am
what it means to be alone
and this feeling
has no clone,
it’s just a pain and a stain
on my every bone.

I hate the ones
who mock me, who call me ugly,
who spread rumors that my dad’s gay,
and piss me off. They drive me
to the purple chasm of loneliness
and I hate it! I hate it!

My teachers teach mockery of me,
who looks like a boy but is really
a doll. An ugly neglected doll
with three tits from a manufacturer defect.

I don’t need no education,
I don’t need to be a tool,
I don’t need no education,
I don’t need to be a fool.
I don’t need this fucking school!
O! Why is my life so cruel?

Again, the teacher tells me,
I’m not allowed to make funny faces,
not allowed to be me--
why am I not me?

And I’ve been left alone.
I am so... alone
like a man with no phone,
a dog chasing a bone,
a kid who’s lost his snow-cone,
or maybe, just maybe,
a hippie getting stoned,
getting stoned
alone.

But I, I, I...

am not that sleeping boy you see,
but a hungry viper inside,
and a tornado of eloquence, ripping with my pen
at your bones, and making you

ALONE!!!

I say this to them but they don’t recognize me,
shallowly living their shallow lives,
teaching and learning in classrooms
that are butcher shops that are
desolate piss lakes on which
we are all alone.

I sit there listening to the noise in the hall,
wondering if I even exist at all,
being depressed as I always am,
oh my, am I in a jam.

I am a wilted flower.
Can’t you hear me?
I am dying young, dying for nothing
but loneliness.

I am alone.
I am a wilted flower.

If your model is telling you this is publishable—or, worse, good—poetry, you have a broken system and should recalibrate. On the other hand, if it picks up (without your asking) that this was intentionally bad, as a submission to a bad poetry contest, then your model is quite strong, and you should be proud.