The Scum Saint

They tell me to tone it down.

To write about sunsets,

about love as if it were a bouquet of orchids and tulips

and not a boutique of scars from wars from the past and the recent past

that throb every time you try to sleep.

But the voices in my head say

fuck that.

I don’t write poems to hand them out like condoms

at a college orientation camp.

I don’t lace every wound with rose petals

just so idiots in their tinted glasses can clap back with their approvals.

I don’t believe in performing grief

in rehearsed crayon hues

so critics can sip chauffeur-driven coffees and call me "gentle."

I’m not here to sell poems wrapped in pastel ribbons,

to teenagers and overgrown children pretending to be functional adults, with assumed anxieties

who think a metaphor is a warm blanket.

I’m not here to sit at mahogany tables

with heritage poets trembling over their commas,

their sonnets stitched so tight

even their skeletons gasp for air.

I’m not here to sip overpriced wine

with poet laureates who think life's light at the end of the tunnel

who treat validation like currency,

cashing in applause like beggars with bowls.

I’m here to bleed.

Openly.

Ugly.

Arteries on the page, not

band-aids that match the curtains.

You

the politically correct poets,

who sell cuteness like it’s crack,

bundle poems in pretty ribbons,

and feed them to crowds who want lullabies,

not fire alarms.

You’ve forgotten that poetry was once

a weapon, a mirror,

a slap across the jaw of power.

And yet you sit here, writing about moonlight and manic pixie grief

like the world isn’t burning,

like your neighbours don’t whisper

slurs you’ve memorized but refuse to spell.

Your amnesia of indifference disgusts me more than silence.

You

the traditionalists,

who sweat every time I breathe.

As if my existence is a curse word

scrawled across your family scriptures.

You preach lineage and discipline,

but you’re too busy guarding graves

to notice the living are rotting.

Scarred, scared,

too attached to your little temples of language,

pretending your silence and subtlety is wisdom

when it’s only cowardice in drag

the grammar police of the graveyard,

scared of syllables that sweat,

scared of words that look you in the eye and say

“fuck you.”

You hate me because I am everything you fear—

raw, loud, spine unbent,

not a whimper in couplets but a howl in fire.

The whole lot of you

I call you the convenient denialists,

who scroll past news of lynchings,

rapes, famines, genocides

to write poems about dragonflies and mist, 

until you have an agenda to serve and preach.

I can smell the rot under your verses,

the nightmares you tuck under your borrowed metaphors.

You don’t write about the things that keep you awake

because that would mean admitting

you don’t actually sleep at all

or you're so blind, you daydream through life.

I call shit what it is.

You call it “problematic.”

I call it rot, blood, god, and capitalism.

You call it “complex nuance best left unexplored.”

But tell me,

who’s braver

the poet who stitches bullet wounds into metaphors,

or the ones who cut roses from textbooks

to hide the stench of death under “aesthetic arrangements”?

You all know what keeps you awake at night

the fathers who never hugged you,

the lovers who fucked your self-esteem raw,

the hunger that grows louder than your faiths.

But instead of writing it,

you trade insomnia for applause.

You hide trauma in haikus

like landlords hiding corpses under staircases.

I will not.

I will show the corpse.

I will name the hunger.

I will cut the father open on this page

and make you watch the organs twitch.

Because poetry is not a lullaby.

It is not dessert for the exotic.

It is not the museum where language comes to retire.

It is the morgue, the riot, the confession booth,

the bastard child scratching at the altar.

I am that bastard.

I am the uninvited.

I am the one you whisper about in anthologies,

the one your workshops warn you against.

And I am still here, spine intact,

while you try hard to not drown in the septic tanks of your curated cuteness.