charm offensive

⭐poetry corner⭐

We don’t want kindness — we want cruelty with a backstory.
Morality never made us feel seen, never whispered
you, specifically instead of preaching to the room.

Give us the man who knows exactly whose throat to step on.
Precision is intimacy. Vagueness is for missionaries—
boring, impersonal, the wrong kind of universal.
We want someone who ruins you specifically,
who remembers your name while doing it.

We forgive murder if the murderer cries beautifully.
We forgive lies if they’re wrapped in the exhausted syntax
of self-awareness. Fatigue is the new virtue—
he looks so tired destroying things.

The hero solves problems, and then what?
We still have to sit with ourselves.
But the anti-hero deals out permission slips.
He holds up our worst impulses like a mirror
we can finally stand to look into,
says everyone, as if majority vote could acquit us.

We don’t want to be good. We want to be legible—
to watch someone worse and feel the sweet, sick relief of almost.

Happy Valentine’s Day to Don Draper, Tony Soprano, the anti-heroes of my dreams — proof that what I want in fiction is exactly what I’d block in real life.

If you made it this far, click that itty-bitty digital organ! ❤️