An Note on Poetry Followed by An Ode to Twitter

You know how in high school, there was always that one assignment you dreaded? Vocab tests. Timed writes. Anything to do with math. Now I wasn't a huge fan of any of those but I wanted to crawl under my desk and rock back and forth the day my AP Literature teacher said, "We are going to be writing a poem a week for the rest of the year!"

In my high schooler mind, good poems were either angsty or abstract and I didn't have a drop of angsty or abstract blood in my body. Not to mention, who wants their teacher reading a poem about their crush? Actually, the better question is what high school teacher wants to read poems about their student's crushes?

So, with every poem, I would sit, and wait, until "inspiration" struck and I could come up with something brilliant. "Inspiration" usually was, "Oh shoot, it's almost 10 and I still don't have anything! Hmmm, how about a poem about not being able to write a poem!" That was all fine and great until all the other kids started doing the same thing...

From that point on, I resolved to write silly poems. Find something in the room and just write about it. For example, I saw a bottle of Elmar's glue so I wrote a piece entitled, "I Know You Want a Little Taste, But Please Dear Child, Don't Eat the Paste" (which I cannot find anywhere! Curse you computers!)

So here it is my friends:

An Ode to Twitter
By Shelby Hintze

Oh thou land of twits

A world where one and all are right
Yet, one and all are wrong
A place where opinion trumps actuality
A place where no matter what Perez declares,
E! News covers it as concrete intelligence

In the vast sea that is Ashton Kutcher’s followers
You will find the deprived man,
The prosperous man, the comical man,
The dim man and Tyra Banks

Only here can a celebrity attain more faithful followers
Than the president himself. And The Onion News network,
Tweets more than CNN.

In this land of blue birds tweeting their joyful,
And sometimes not so joyful song,
We common folk can live vicariously through
Ms. Cyrus. That is, until the heartrending day
She left this land, never to tweet again.