I came across this the other day when I was going through some old Word documents on my computer’s hard drive. There was a mysterious file named “Poetry,” which contained, among other things, the original free-verse version of “The Sadness Worm,” which I thought had been lost forever.
The green worm that lives in sadness,
Wants to find a human heart.
For it craves the taste of it the most.
So very bitter the taste of sadness is.
And no wonder.
The bitterness is the worm you taste.
Its bitterness is the poison of sadness.
The sadness worm is made of it.
A parasite that lodges in your heart,
Eating and eating it all away.
Each time you swallow bitterness,
You swallow the sadness worm.
It eats and eats and eats your heart,
Until it is all gone.
And only a lump of sadness remains.
Random Misanthrope 
Wow. Very moving and visual. Although at the same time it kind of makes me think of a really bad tequila advertisement, but that’s probably just me. 😉
Seriously though, I find it very moving.
Thanks, Ken. I wrote this many years ago and it was inspired by a passage from the Amy Tan novel “Joy Luck Club,” where she states that Chinese women are expected to eat their sadness and swallow their own bitterness. That metaphor really affected me and stuck with me.
I do think that the updated rhyming version is much better, though. This one just sounds a bit self-indulgent and amateurish to me.