Why I Write Poems That Make People Uncomfortable

There is a version of poetry that exists to make you feel better. I don’t write that kind.

I write from the dark — from questions that burned through years I didn’t sign up for, trials I became an unwilling participant in before I understood what consent even meant in that context. I write about the things that have a hold on us. The ones we don’t look at directly because looking means admitting they’re still there.

We are taught to want resolution. Life moving cleanly from point A to point B, grief arriving and then, mercifully, leaving. We want the bow on it. The ending that means something. But sometimes there is no ending. Sometimes you just get fucked over, and a thank you is attached to it. The same time, same place? A silence that means you’re expected to keep going as if nothing happened.

And sometimes you’re not okay with that. And nobody tells you what to do with it then.

I found out in a group therapy session when I was nineteen. I was the youngest person in the room by over a decade, surrounded by adults who looked at me the way people look at someone who showed up to the wrong funeral. What could she possibly have? I felt it without anyone saying it. I hated that I had to justify my presence in my own pain.

So I stopped talking and started writing instead. The therapist noticed. The group noticed. And what I wrote that day wasn’t pretty or resolved — it was true in a way that talking had never let me be. Something loosened. Not healed. Loosened. A battle cry of the past that poured out from my lungs and into the air before being spewed down on paper. It left me numb. It left me thoughtful.

That’s what I want from a poem. Not catharsis in the clean sense, not the cry that fixes things. I want the emotion that was locked behind your sternum, the one you didn’t have language for until the line landed. A cold silence after reading something that named the thing you’d been carrying. I want to say the thing people are afraid to say out loud — about anxiety, about violation, about the particular loneliness of being dismissed, because saying it stops it from eating me alive. And because someone else is in a room right now feeling what I felt at nineteen, and they need to know a voice exists for it. Someone out there needs to know that they are not alone.

My poems are not for everyone. I’m not interested in being for everyone. Some writers can craft beautiful work that reaches a softer part of the soul, that work matters, and it isn’t mine. I will lose people. The silence after some posts will stretch too long. I’m okay with that.

I am not malleable for the common consumer. No — I will roll over your tongue while you choke down my words.

But for the ones who stay. For the ones who read it twice because it named something they’d never said out loud. That’s why I write the uncomfortable poems.

Thank you for your time and for reading. Chel is a lost soul — so to speak. Drifting in and out of prose and writing like a leaf on the wind. Hoping to find something that sticks. In this essay, she talks about her reasons for writing about the dark. Hope that you enjoyed the conversation. If you would like to add to it. Feel free to do so here: