Let’s get one thing straight: poetry isn’t soft.

It’s not that delicate thing your high school teacher made you dissect like it was a frog on a tray. It’s not all roses are red and vague heartbreak under a full moon. Real poetry—the good stuff—is a bar fight in a whisper. It’s the art of taking a chainsaw to your chest, yanking out whatever twitching thing is left of your soul, and serving it up line by line—with rhythm.

Because poetry? It’s not for the faint of heart. It’s for the bold, the bruised, the truth-hungry. It’s the written form of standing naked in a thunderstorm and screaming something you didn’t know you believed until the thunder answered back.

The Trick of the Tongue

Here’s the thing: poetry lies to tell the truth.

It wraps raw feelings in silk words, kisses you on the forehead, and then headbutts your expectations. It’s not interested in surface-level confessions. It wants your contradictions, your guilty pleasures, the time you cried during a commercial but told your friends it was allergies. Poetry digs into that inner dirt with gold dust in mind.

And the best poets? They make you feel seen—and then they vanish like ghosts, leaving you holding a sentence that hits like a freight train.

Try this: read Sylvia Plath’s “Lady Lazarus” without feeling like someone lit a match in your chest. Or Neruda’s love poems, where even peaches feel erotic. Or the calm rage of Audre Lorde, who could burn down a system with a single, measured stanza.

The Soul Speaks in Metaphor

Here’s a wild theory: the human soul doesn’t speak English, or French, or Mandarin. It speaks in metaphor. It thinks in symbols, dreams, and surreal little moments that don’t make sense until they’re written down and rearranged into meaning.

That’s why poetry works. Because it skips the logical, stiff language we use at our day jobs and taps into that primal voice in the back of your skull. The one that knows things before your brain catches up.

So when someone writes, “I am a museum full of art, but you had your eyes shut”—you feel it. You’ve lived it. You’ve been the museum, the closed eyes, and the idiot who didn’t look.

Why the Hell Does It Matter?

Because poetry reminds us we’re alive. Not just scrolling, consuming, surviving—but feeling. And in a world drowning in hot takes, clickbait, and filters that make everyone look like wax dolls, poetry is the punch in the gut we forgot we needed.

It’s proof that language still has teeth.

It teaches us to pay attention. To sit with discomfort. To find the divine in the mundane and the profound in the petty. Poetry takes your Monday morning misery and turns it into mythology. It gives your heartbreak an echo. It makes you realize that someone, somewhere, once felt exactly what you’re feeling now—and they turned it into something that sings.

Final Word (Sharp, Not Soft)

So no, poetry isn’t dead. It’s just underground, like all dangerous things.

It lives in the notebooks of the brokenhearted. In the mouths of people too honest for small talk. In the hands of those who still believe that words can wound and heal, often at the same time.

You want to touch the depth of the human soul?

Forget the self-help books.

Read a damn poem.