A Compendium Of Horrible, Horrible Twitter Poetry

Twitter is an inherently silly and disposable means of communication. Oh, but there are people out there who take their tweets seriously. Very seriously. AFFIRMED.

Like Will Leitch, I'm a big fan of Roger Ebert. I grew up watching him and reading his very thick movie review reference books. Ebert's been extremely prolific of late, writing brilliant blog posts and movie reviews and maintaining probably the best Twitter feed in the universe. He's awesome.

Ah, but there's a snag, you see. When you subscribe to Ebert's Twitter feed, you also get his retweets. You used to be able to turn off retweets from people you follow on Twitter, but that feature has been temporarily disabled because Twitter is a horribly run company that almost always relies on its users to make it better. Now, I love me some Ebert, but even he'd happily admit that what tickles his fancy may not tickle yours. And man alive, some of the shit he retweets is just… Well, let me show you what I'm talking about.

That's the Twitter feed of Natasha Badhwar. Yes, those are flowers in the background. That lets you know just how poemy her tweets are. There are Twitter feeds like this all over the place, featuring 140-character works of twiterature so painfully earnest, so brutally flowery, that I don't know whether or not to fall over laughing or put my fist through the fucking screen. A little girl was sad because her imaginary friend died. INNOCENCE IS LOST FOREVER. WITH GROWTH COMES DEATH. I fear for the day Natasha's child discovers a broken toy in her box of Lucky Charms. The resulting flurry of sad tweets could potentially be the next "Howl". Or not.

And how about this?

Now, it may seem unnecessarily mean to make fun of someone who is so genuine about their writing. But… Oh, who the fuck am I kidding? This is horrible. It's so pretentious and writery and GAH! It's like a Hybrid driver showing you a picture of his Hybrid that he keeps in his hemp wallet. Read this shit:

Rain like a drunk at a broken piano whose green keys all play the same note. The hornets still hide their hoard in a gray paper sack.

so much depends upon

a red wheel barrow

glazed with rain water

beside the white chickens. PLZ RETWEET

Here's actor John Larroquette's feed. Daulerio says, "I follow him just to puke."

Christ, it's like a Sting lyric on Clomid.

And here's a feed named George Lazenby, which may or may not be that Bond guy. I'm not sure. But it doesn't matter, because the posts are so hysterically shitty. Half of them are in French!

This doesn't mean anything! You're making it up as you go along! "Oui oui merci foofoo. The morning… it smells of old candy. A mouse scurries to an unknown end. Clouds billow like God puffing his cheeks. PLEASE USE THIS AS A YEARBOOK QUOTE."

Just a single wren? That's so sad. What if the wren were to get an imaginary friend? And then that imaginary friend died! THEN THE WREN WOULD BE SAD AND WOULDN'T KNOW WHY.

This is but a taste of the self-seriousness Twitter can deliver to you on a daily basis. I'm sure our commenters have seen more, and seen worse. The old cliché was that Twitter was where people went to tell the world what they had for breakfast. But as you can see, it's so much more than that. It is a bowl of cream of wheat, each granule glistening like a baby pearl. While outside, a single hummingbird dances ‘round the orchid. Life begins anew.

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