Pollution

Once there was a little fish,

Free to go where’r she wish,

Free to dance and dive and swish,

A small, big-dreaming little fish.

.

That little fish went out one day,

Into the ocean to frolic and play,

And find some friends along the way,

But the ocean was dirty and crowded and gray.

.

The garbage spread like a disease,

Clogging the water with aimless sleaze,

The sheer amount made the small fish wheeze,

She tried to escape, she squoze and squeezed.

.

She needed help, she needed friends,

She wished for a way that she could cleanse,

Her home of the trash in the hundreds and tens,

But her hope seemed to come all to meaningless ends.

.

“Help me, friends! I’m all alone,

In a place that used to feel like home,

Now I’m lost and current-blown,

In a noisome mess that’s only grown.”

.

But she was only a little fish,

And could not move more than a swish,

She was tired of this ish,

The sad, sad tale of the little fish.

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I love Vocal, I really do. But in my almost three years on the site, I've found it so hard to connect with other writers on the platform. I'll take a fair amount of the blame, I could be tons better about reading and commenting, but it's so, so hard to even find a good place to start in the mess that is the AI takeover. Sometimes it feels like I'm sifting through the pacific garbage patch just to find another real life person. In one of the challenges I viewed recently, over 95% of entries were generated articles that had nothing to do with the prompt. Does anyone else feel this way? How do y'all build community on this site?