Most Depressing Poem Ever Written
 

This thread is indeed a competition. Who can write the most depressing poem?

As a model of a depressing poem here is something by Georgy Ivanov (I want to put the last seven lines on a Hallmark card):

It's good that Russia has no Tsar,
it's good that Russia's just a dream,
it's good that God has disappeared,

that nothing's real, except the stars
in icy skies, the yellow gleam
of dawn, the unrelenting years.

It's good that people don't exist,
that nothingness is all there is,
that life's as dark and cold as this;

until we couldn't be more dead,
nor ever were so dark before,
and no one now can bring us aid,
nor even needs to anymore.

It’s hard to keep up with the cleaning
when something inside you is screaming
that every new breath
takes you closer to death
and your life is bereft of all meaning.

Life is pain,
Then you die.
Do you gain?
No. Why try?

Whoa, not what I expected, but lusciously depressing, nonetheless.

A depressing limerick and a poem in trochaic dimeter--rollicking, ironic depressiveness.

We're literally all going to die.
There is no God and no-one cares.
No deed or word or thought you try
Remotely consoles, absolves, repairs.
We're literally all going to die.

Vlad's challenger

He tried.
He failed.
He died
Impaled.

Let there be light

“I’m God!” screamed the Donald. “You’re mutton!
I’ll boil you alive! I’m a glutton!
You’re nothing but sheep!”
Then the orange-haired creep
Cooked the world as he pushed the red button.

Housman’s Epitaph

My time was always running out,
My faith in doom always devout.
No scholarly attainments can
Revise the fate prescribed for man.

I never looked on blooming spring
Without chill thoughts of wintering,
Nor ever drew a living breath
Unmindful of impending death.

I knew what would in time betide
Each muscular young lad I eyed,
And knew that I must lie someday
Beside them all beneath the clay.

You shall be dust like me ere long,
For pessimism’s never wrong.
It came at last, my time to go.
I knew it would. I told you so.

Ageless Epiphanies

Tweezing the hair from my imposing nose,
I know where the hair from my head now grows.

Trimming my chin hair, now turned yellow,
I see that I am a ripening fellow.

Eying the chicks with one good eye,
I read their signs: Geezers Need Not Apply!

Clipping my crotch hair, lank and grizzled,
I grasp that libido has finally fizzled!

Aaron, I'm afraid that Mr Ivanov is over-optimistic in believing that even a few things actually exist:

...nothing's real, except the stars
in icy skies, the yellow gleam
of dawn ...

The truth is:

The yellow gleam of dawn? Surprise, surprise!
It’s simply caused by jaundice-riddled eyes.
Those twinkling lights? I’m sorry, they’re not stars,
Just pinpricks in our damaged retinas.

A thought at breakfast, still and sad,
makes you pause the butter knife:
the chances are you've already had
the happiest moment of your life.

Mark,

Compared to mine, your life was better;
you had a knife and even butter.

Well, it's usually margarine, but that wouldn't scan.

A Troika

Vladimir Putin’s losing cred.
Some hope he’ll soon be stone-cold dead.

They’re saying Vlad’s a Kleptocrat
Who steals their food so they eat rat.

Once a Soviet, always Russian,
Vlad attacks with Trump’s permission.

I tried to write a poem today
Which would have brought a big payday,
But language foiled my brilliant plan:
The f@#king truth wouldn't scan.

Mark, I reckon "the chances are" is too optimistic. Don't give us any hope!

It's just not what poetry is for! - give or take the odd Russian depressive. Re. the previous warnings of impending doom, nothing beats Spike Milligan's proposed epitaph.
(Was it ever executed?)

"I told you I was poorly."

Matt,

A thought at breakfast, still and sad,
makes you pause the butter knife:
you know that you've already had
the happiest moment of your life.

Happy now? ;)

(though I prefer my original: less hyperbole, more resigned realism = more genuinely depressing)

Edit: Aaron. That made me laugh..

HALLMARK

A baby's born. From his first breath
he merely is postponing death
so that he might, before the end,
discover he can't comprehend
the world he's born to, or the pain
of being trapped inside his brain
alongside other people who,
like him, don't seem to have a clue,
and even when the boy grows old,
and after, when his corpse is cold,
he'll never know his life was just
a trick performed by wind and dust.

LIFE

We're born.
We die.
Between,
we cry.

We starve.
We thirst.
We pray.
We're cursed.

We think.
We feel.
We are
not real.

We shout.
We rail.
We strive.
We fail.

Gotta hand it to Roger-Bob
I'm so depressed I have to Sobbbb

Born crying
Live sighing
Welcome dying

The Sea

I went down to the tumultuous sea
To watch it dance in liquid fury
And found it locked in monotony
And felt it retch in agony
And saw it heave in captivity.

The sea, the sea
and you and me.

It's hard to imagine any poem more depressing--or, by looking so squarely at death and making art of it, more uplifiting--than Larkin's "Aubade."

But since the thread asks us to write our own:

The winter of our discontent
It's far too late to circumvent
For we have managed to cement
A reputation we'll repent.
Donald Trump is President.

To an Old Hippie, On his 60th Birthday
 

After age 60, what is the use
Of trying to quit the drugs of abuse?

Booze is a lifelong need, I fancy;
And swearing off weed is even more chancy.

And as for tobacco, and here I'm not joking;
Science has proven that cancer cures smoking.

I wrote this for my brother in law 7 years ago. Ironically, he lives on.

E. A. Robinson spent a lifetime writing depressing poetry; Richard Corey is probably his best known effort

Thanks, Douglas. I licked a stamp!

Great Robinson parody, Ralph. And, you wrote it in record time. Try submitting it to Light.

My Grandmother and her sister Ruth worked as servants for the Johnson family (the richest family in town) before World War I. When the Influenza epidemic came, it killed off many of the nurses in the local hospital, so there was a crash program to train replacements.

Aunt Ruth signed up, and stayed on as a nurse there for 54 years. Eventually Admiral William Veazie Pratt, a heartthrob of my grandmother and Aunt Ruth (he had married one of the Johnson girls) went into a slow steady decline, and spent the last couple years of his life in the hospital.

My grandmother and Aunt Ruth would discuss how sad it was to see their girlhood hero go downhill. After he died, Aunt Ruth said I was a "wicked boy" for writing this obituary for my classmates;

Admiral William Veazie Pratt
Did not expire just like that;
At eighty seven, he went blind,
And then he slowly lost his mind.

[I entered an earlier version of this acrostic in Spectator competition 2990, A to P]


As Air Force One banks, what he sees is ash
Below, across the States. And still there billow
Clouds miles high; so scarcely have skies cleared,
Day upon day. The millions doomed to die
Exposed to toxic air, as lava-bombs explode,
Flee futilely. The President may fly,
Give speeches (bold assurance!), declaim grief:
How, though, can he hold out a solid hope?
If U.S. heartland’s now a pit of ire,
Just who still trusts in Trump? - A barren jest.
Killing winds choke countryfolk and kine.
Long-known, Yellowstone’s strained lava-dome -
Made open sore now - gushes; roaring, masks
News radioed to President in flight: more noise
Of spreading riots. “Call the Army off!
Police too. Useless... Land! Mexico, please.”

Since Rupture
 

These days of darkness linger -
Too, the glow:
The orange, brooding glow, that bodes no dawn
Nor end to days of darkness,
That alone
Defines now a horizon –
Weeks unseen –
And fitful upward gouts, a yellow boil.

He staggers, careful, by his well-felt path
To fetch the new day’s water from the barn –
Impractical, but then they did not know
How days would darken, and prolong, and so
They’d filled that irrigation-tank quite full
Before the mains failed - and the stream, as well -

Yet somehow never towed it nearer home.
That trailer with its plastic cube, man-high,
Seems like an Ark of Covenant of God:
It almost as an idol holds his heart
Match-calibrated by the volume left.

The torch he turns, dynamo whining high,
Breathes shrill and plaintive light in puffs too faint
To blow away the gloom - or colour show.
He’s glad of that, in passing;
Uncle now
Lies still, since dogs departed. Long their snarls
And howls have been heard only in his dreams;

But whether dreams of day or mares by night,
Who knows? He cannot tell; there is no light…
Save sullen glow - and lightning braiding cloud.
The growl of it, he guesses, must be loud
But now is mated in him with his pulse;
And whether ash or dullness weave his shroud,
He reckons he’s near-deaf from that first blast.

The air stays breathable; he checked, of course,
By sniffing at the cracked door ere he struck
Out on his daily errand (call them days;
He’s dropped the hours now water is his clock)
But vagrant winds, foul downpours, may erase
The air of life, and poison bring instead,
Capricious as a goat-demon’s sly breath:
This Hallowe’en of weather tricks-or-treats.

He fills the gallon canister again,
Each drop a sacrament,
None to despise:
He turns the tap; doffs, re-attaches, cap;
In childlike, rapt attention, late grown wise.

He treads retracing, listening with ears
That yearn for and yet dread a motor’s drone
Upon the highway; locks and double-bolts the door,
Climbs stairs, and locks another door again;
And only then feels partway safe at home.
It's weeks since gunshots punctuated night.

He has a little lantern, turned down low.
He ekes its oil (like Noah in the Ark,
He guesses);
Distant-yet-near kinship feels
With all enclosed perforce in long distresses.

He sees again their radio, and shudders.
They’d scanned the wavelengths, early in this dark,
But found news brought more fear than solace then.
The worst was when they chanced upon those screams;
Quickly Uncle’s fingers turned them off...

Then, hours on, to wash that sound away
(And guessing dearly 'Maybe just a play')
They'd tried again, but found the cries again:
And what was worse, it was the selfsame voice.

By silent
Joint decision – now, his own –
The radio has been established mute
(Hope trickling like batteries’ charge away)
Yet still enshrined in place;
Perhaps a day
Of light may yet dawn, heralding some change
And toxic memories be salved
And healed, along with life and land.

A tapping echoes; rattles!
Not… The door?
His heart jolts -
Then assumes a rapid beat.
The tempo is erratic, grows around;
The roof-tiles and the window-panes vibrate.

He fears a further danger, and so dares
Not venture out, but winds his torch instead
(Extempore, accompanying sound!)
And probes it, cryptic key, into the black
That door-like looms beyond the screening glass.
He sees
What first he thinks is hail, but not as white;
Not ice, but something pebbly and dull,
Here pulverized, there aggregate in clumps.

Time passes, and it ceases.
Finally
He risks to raise one sash a cautious crack;
A whiff of brimstone sends his head fast back,
But it’s not overwhelming, and he delves
With one deft kerchief-covered hand
Before he seals himself again inside.

He brings his lantern – turns that up a notch –
And finds his mind tries various ways to grasp
The mottled granule – tan and primrose blotch -
He holds within his hand.
Light, yellow… stone?

…Yellowstone.

RESUME

Pain and heartache,
woe, despair,
all at once
you lose your hair,

friends desert you,
others die,
love, it seems,
is just a lie.

You tell yourself,
"I will be strong!
Hope awaits!"
But you are wrong.

Find a bridge.
It's time to jump.
The president
is Donald Trump.

Is it time, my friends, to have you vote for the most depressing poem on this thread? Should I let the thread collect more depressing poems for a few days? Do you really want a competition and someone to shuffle off victorious in a laurel crown of yew berries, the despot of depression?

This is how I'm thinking the voting will go: rank your top three choices in order (just list the post # on this thread for the poem)--I will give 3 points for a number one ranking, 2 points for a number two ranking and 1 point for a number three ranking. Poets are encouraged to vote for their own work.

This could be a real competition if you want. I don't know--it's all just so depressing.

Our first breath
Leads to death.

New poems only, or are previously written but nonetheless depressing poems allowed?

He’s Falling Apart at the Seams it Seems

Feet are swollen, ankles strained
knees are locked and steps restrained.
Hips are stiff and gut so bloated
once-deep inny’s fully outted!

Prostate’s absent, pizzle’s napping
breasts are bulging, dewlaps flapping.
Nose’s knobbed and ears now bristle,
flabby lips no longer whistle.

Brains, those left, used to be deft,
but losing heft are thought-bereft.
Will this fleshy suit he owns
unravel seams till he’s just bones?

We're born to bad,
then grow to worse,
then coffin-clad
we ride a hearse.

The mill churns on.
Our lives are grist.
And then we're gone.
We are not missed.
.
.
.

Mr. Smith, bring on the previously written depressing poems. They only need to be original (that is, yours).

Best,

Aaron

Things will worsen bye and bye;
There is no pie up in the sky.
You needn't pray and bow your head;
Worms await you when your're dead.

Clothes to Die For!

Croak cloaks
Cremation clothes
Dead threads
Dead dresses
Dead duds
Dead dude’s duds
Dead diva’s duds
Corpse clothes
Body rags
Sad rags
Final fashions
Ghost garbs
Death dons
Demise dons
Cadaver covers
Pall shawls
Grave garb
Winding sheets
Underworld underwear
Burial boots
Kick-the-bucket kicks
Cerement suits
ουσ. Σάβανο

I wonder...
xxxxxxxxxxx"Can there ever be
a life, quite pointless?"
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx...then that's me.

Another very depressing poem, not a funny one, is called Lo Fatal, and was written by Rubén Darío. My translation is here (scroll down to "Fated").