Amanda Palmer's "A Poem for Dzhokhar" Is the Worst Poem of All Time (With Pictures)

By: Max Read

This weekend, as law-enforcement officers across the country devoted their resources to the manhunt and capture of the dangerous criminal Reese Witherspoon, an actual crime against humanity was being ignored: Musician Amanda Palmer was writing the worst poem ever composed in the English language, "A Poem for Dzhokhar."

(WARNING: If you visit her site on your phone, you will be asked to download "The Amanda Palmer App," which may induce internal bleeding and permanent blindness.):

Spoiler:

you don’t know how it felt to be in the womb but it must have been at least a little warmer than this.

you don’t know how intimately they’re recording your every move on closed-circuit cameras until you see your face reflected back at you through through the pulp.

you don’t know how to stop picking at your fingers.

you don’t know how little you’ve been paying attention until you look down at your legs again.

you don’t know how many times you can say you’re coming until they just stop believing you.

you don’t know how orgasmic the act of taking in a lungful of oxygen is until they hold your head under the water.

you don’t know how many vietnamese soft rolls to order.

you don’t know how convinced your parents were that having children would be, absolutely, without question, the correct thing to do.

you don’t know how precious your iphone battery time was until you’re hiding in the bottom of the boat.

you don’t know how to get away from your fucking parents.

you don’t know how it’s possible to feel total compassion in one moment and total disconnection in the next moment.

you don’t know how things could change so incredibly fast.

you don’t know how to make something, but the instructions are on the internet.

you don’t know how to make sense of this massive parade.

you don’t know how to believe anyone anymore.

you don’t know how to tell the girl in the chair next to you that you’ve been peeking at her dissertation draft and there’s a grammatical typo in the actual file name.

you don’t know how to explain yourself.

you don’t want two percent but it’s all they have.

you don’t know how claustrophobic your house is until you can’t leave it.

you don’t know why you let that guy go without shooting him dead and stuffing him in some bushes between cambridge and watertown.

you don’t know where your friends went.

you don’t know how to dance but you give it a shot anyway.

you don’t know how your life managed to move twenty six miles forward and twenty eight miles back.

you don’t know how to pay your debts.

you don’t know how to separate from this partnership to escape and finally breathe.

you don’t know how come people run their goddamn knees into the ground anyway.

you don’t know how to measure the value of the twenty dollar bill clutched in your hurting hand.

you don’t know how you walked into this trap so obliviously.

you don’t know how to adjust the rearview mirror.

you don’t know how to mourn your dead brother.

you don’t know how to drive this car.

you don’t know the way to new york.

you don’t know the way to new york.

you don’t know the way to new york.

you don’t know the way to new york.

This is bad. It's bad writing, it's bad timing, it's bad ideas; it's inane and self-serving, and adds nothing to our understanding of the marathon bombing, or of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, or of terrorism. Well: it adds a new way to make jokes. And also the poem adds Palmer, elbowing her way in to the conversation, insisting on her right to speak for a teenager she never met and to whose thoughts and feelings she has no access, demanding that we recognize her bravery for doing so, and then later telling us all that it's our fault we misunderstood:

Just in case: I did. It still sucked. But Palmer's not wrong! It is about more than just what we think it is. It's not just about a basic inability to craft a compelling image, it's also about Palmer's own egotism. "A Poem for Dzhokhar" is not, really, "for" Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the 19-year-old college kid who, along with his older brother, allegedly detonated a bomb at the Boston Marathon last week. It's for Palmer, a deluded and opportunistic narcissist who sells rhetorical snake oil to people too full of unearned self-regard to join an actual cult. It's another way she can make sure people are looking at her, and we shouldn't even write about it—if we write about it, she wins—except that in this case she has actually created something remarkable: a world-historically horrific poem.