Who Killed Poetry?

I don’t love words.

I understand their utility.

Love is biased.

But need?

Need is precise. Objective.

I hold words

like a surgeon grips a scalpel —

not to beautify,

but to open.

To expose.

To excise.

I don’t write poetry because it’s beautiful.

I write it because it’s necessary.

Like a gangrenous wound

demands a blade,

this festering world

demands dissection.

We live in strange times —

times too sanitized

to admit that living isn't beautiful.

That every breath arrives

wearing the baggage of the last.

That we are rodents

gnawing on the refuse

of forgotten gods and broken empires.

Poetry has forgotten itself.

Poets —

those entrusted with truths —

now wrap their words

in packaging so pristine,

so glimmering with artifice,

you can’t tell fact from fiction.

Lies, sold in lyric.

Pain, painted in pastels.

What happened to poetry

that spilled guts,

gutted gods,

named the rot

and carved its name

into the world’s silence?

When did poetry

become fantasy for fetishes?

When did it become

word porn for the delicate,

so flawless it flinched

even the optimists?

We live in a world

that sells war as peacekeeping,

crowns dictators as democrats,

buries truths six feet deep

and offers flowers to the grave

like nothing's wrong.

And still,

poets tell you

life is beautiful,

morning will come,

your wounds are wisdom,

your tiny mortality

is somehow divine.

And I stand —

not with a quill,

but a scalpel.

Writing poetry like autopsy reports.

One vertebrate

among a congregation of snakes,

who hiss in metaphors

but sell their tongues

to the highest bidder.

If everyone whores the truth,

truth becomes just

another polished lie.

And a world

that forgets its truths

will drown

in its own delusions.

That’s not dystopia.

That’s denial

with glitter on it.

Between your sanitized today

and make-believe tomorrow,

I stand —

scalpel in hand.

Surgeon or psychopath —

that depends.

Are you living life?

Or just dreaming it?