Soft Porn For The Sophisticated Urban

Poetry once roared.

It had rust in its lungs and a blade for a tongue —

not for decorative royalty,

but dissection to the basics.

It sliced through dogma,

bled truth in uncomfortable shades,

and held a mirror no one wanted to look into.

It wasn’t pretty.

It wasn’t safe.

It wasn’t yours to digest with lukewarm green tea and assorted cookies.

Now?

It comes wrapped in fancy cellophane and pastel shades,

with trigger warnings and discount codes to overpriced shows —

a self-help manual for the easily bedazzled

masquerading as metaphor.

What used to be protest

is now performance.

Pain is curated,

grief is rehearsed,

and rage wears a badge that says:

“Be kind. I’m monetizing this.”

Poetry is no longer a scalpel.

It’s a soft sponge —

sanitized, sweetened,

and soaked in self-importance.

It flirts with hollow glamour of shallow verses.

It seduces applause.

It censors its teeth

just to get laid by the literary elite.

And we?

We clap our hands.

We snap our fingers.

We call it brave

when it’s barely breathing.

Between the velvet cushions of feel-good fiction

and the cosmetic grief of borrowed identities,

the spine is gone.

The blood’s been washed off.

Only the bones remain —

plastic, posed, polished.

Because somewhere along the way,

we stopped writing to understand,

and started writing to be understood.

To be liked.

To be safe.

To be sponsored.

We forgot:

Art was never meant to comfort the comfortable.

It was meant to disturb the dishonest.

Expose the inconvenient.

Shatter delusion.

Not sell out stadiums of the self-soothed.

But now?

We peddle wounds like artisanal crafts.

We frame suffering like home décor.

We whisper truth in validation-approved skeletons

and call it poetry —

as if echo chambers are pilgrimages,

and affirmation is salvation.

So if you're writing poetry

that doesn’t make someone flinch,

fume,

or feel slightly violated by the truth —

you're writing lullabies, not literature.

And the next time someone tells me

poetry must be palatable,

I’ll hand them a scalpel

and ask them to eat it.

Bon appétit, motherfuckers.