Death to the rhymed couplet

It's day two of the high school poetry slam at West Jordan High School. Today at 1:45 p.m. is the showdown.

The big event of today was when a girl, by all accounts a very good girl, who recited an inspirational ditty--that she didn't write! It's the one that starts, "if you think you're beaten, you are . . . " and goes on to affirm that the man who wins is the one who thinks he can. A small furor broke out among the girls wearing System of a Down teeshirts. I think they thought that the cheater would win. Oh how wrong they were! for the judges, never to be fooled, rated the poem low on the merits. Even if she had invented the alphabet in which the poem were written, we would have flunked it on Aesthetic Expression, Language, and Imagery.

Otherwise, if one could die from an overexposure to rhyming, I would be a moldering corpse.

However, one girl wrote a poem called "It's What's on the Inside that Counts." It went something like this:

"I slice and dice baby bunnies
I torture people in captivity
I [insert grotesque psychopathic behavior]

[several verses along the lines of the above]

refrain:
You may think I'm cruel;
but I have the heart of a child.

[pregnant pause]

In a jar."

[eruption of joy in audience of adolescents]