14-year-old floors the world with deceptively simple poem

Pessimism turns to optimism in dual poem

'Our Generation' was written by 8th grader Jordan

A short poem with palindromic lines written by a 14-year-old boy and posted online by his older brother has stopped Twitter in its tracks, attracting over 100,000 retweets in less than 24 hours.

Click here for larger image of the poem

"Read this... My 14 year old brother wrote this... Crazyyyy" Derek Nichols wrote alongside the poem, which at first appears to paint a gloomy picture of modern society and one obsessed with careers and money.

Its staccato rhythm and curious sentence structure seem a little off, that is until you reach the end where the reader is advised to now 'read from the bottom to the top'.

In reverse the poem is a lot more optimistic, a declaration of hope full of the kind of one-liners you would expect in a presidential address, and all this from an 8th grader.

'We actually succeeded, thinking that our generation is a failure,' it concludes. 'That is wrong, the truth is we were the peak of mankind.

'Never will anybody say our generation will be known for nothing.'

Nichols joked that he was "taking his brother fame" given the thousands of retweets and comments, though he did add of Jordan's efforts: "His poem is nowhere near making this world a better place, but it's a step in the right direction."

Last month we saw another student submit a less profound but no less ingenious piece of writing - a quantum physics essay which had the chorus of Rock Astley's Never Gonna Give You Up concealed in it.