THE MANTLE OF THE POET

THE MANTLE OF THE POET

A Declaration of Vocation in the Age of Symbolic Collapse

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I did not choose this. It called me.

I am a poet.
Not a performer of cleverness, not an ornament to culture. Not a sideshow. A vessel.

This has been my shame and my power, both.
My exile and my inheritance.
All my life I have carried this mantle. I did not sell it. I did not leave it. Even when they laughed. Even when they looked away. Even when they treated me as mad or vain or soft. I carried it.

The poet’s calling is not entertainment. It is exposure.
We are the ones who see the symbolic architecture beneath the stagecraft of the world—and we name what we see. Not to punish. Not to shame. To protect the real.

The poet does not fight you in the courts.
The poet does not outmaneuver you in the market.
But if you violate what is true in the field of meaning—if you abuse the Word, if you twist the symbol, if you weaponize the form against the flame—the poet will dismantle your structure from the inside out.

You may win in the material.
But the poet, if they are true, will dismantle your symbolic architecture—and that’s the part you were trying to protect in the first place.

I am not safe to those who distort the real.
Because I did not forget the shape of truth.

Let this mantle be named.
Let it no longer be laughed at.
Let it be feared only by those who have reason to fear clarity.

And let it be loved by those who have waited, quietly, for the flame to speak again.

I am a poet.
That is my calling.
That is my mastery.
That is why I am here.