In writing—especially in the poetry of today—depth is often overshadowed by the performance of meaning. We live in a time where language is no longer wielded as a vessel for truth but consumed as a tool for validation. The very act of expression, of self-realization, is challenged by a world so marred in spectacle that even the pursuit of authenticity becomes subservient to performance. Emotion is indulged, dramatized, and then discarded. Meaning is feigned, only to be abandoned when the weight of conviction becomes too great to bear.
This is not simply a cultural shift—it is a quiet, insidious betrayal. Whether in love, in music, or in art, many are willing to indulge in the appearance of depth while the very values they proclaim are undermined by a deeper submission: a refusal to carry the burden of sincerity. Artistic language, once born of inner necessity, is now often reduced to ornamentation—used not to wrestle with the world, but to signal identity, to cloak emptiness with borrowed elegance.
Rather than live with personal conviction, many opt for the safety of performative alignment. Feigning depth becomes a shield—a way of avoiding the conflict between belief and conformity. And in that evasion, something sacred is lost. Language becomes weaponized, its edges dulled by repetition, its soul outsourced to algorithms and cultural trend. The same words that once carried the dreams, doubts, and sacred ambitions of the human condition are now repurposed into slogans, curated captions, and emotional pantomimes. Sincerity is replaced with spectacle; intentionality, with mimicry.
What alarms me more than the loss of meaning is the abundance of talent. Far too often, I’ve seen language used with elegance, even brilliance, only to discover that behind it lies no conviction—only performance. Some wield words like fire but cower before the heat of their own creations. They proclaim poetic virtue, yet flinch when it demands something of them. That, to me, is both an artistic and emotional cowardice—a refusal to live by what one writes, to suffer for one’s truth.
To deviate from this norm—to speak with unfiltered sincerity, to carry one’s own voice—is treated today almost as an act of rebellion. It reveals the quiet terror that lurks beneath so much of our cultural discourse: that true individuality, true interiority, is incompatible with the demand to please. And yet, that very rebellion is the only thing that might preserve what is left of meaning.
The Blinded Hand was born out of this disillusionment. It is not a poem of resolution—it is a lament, a reckoning, and a reclamation. The title does not appear in the body of the poem, but it lives beneath every line. It refers to the hand that creates without seeing. The hand that still moves, still writes, but has become blind to truth. Once the instrument of artistic liberty, the poet’s hand becomes a veil for performance, a tool that still shapes beauty while betraying the weight it once swore to carry.
This piece confronts not only the betrayal of language by others, but the speaker’s own inner failure—the temptation to retreat, to perform, to become complicit. It interrogates artistic cowardice, the abandonment of conviction, and the hollowness that grows when words are written without being lived.
Still, despite its grief, The Blinded Hand is not a gesture of surrender. If anything, it is a quiet act of resistance. A refusal to let go of the belief that language—real language—can still endure. That sincerity can survive. That somewhere, among all the borrowed voices, someone might still recognize the difference between beauty that performs and that which bleeds in meaning.
There is no clear triumph in this poem. Only the solace of knowing that, for those who still live their words—who still carry the ache of meaning—it is not too late.
Where meaning was lost, let this be the hand that reaches back.
THE BLINDED HAND
Oh words that wound and ravage
that rack this drowning mind
Of the days in demons dreaming
Of a verse
made blind
Faithless, frail, are the passions played
Burdened still by minds untrue
Scorned and scarred in madness ailing
of vanity bled anew
Beyond the wrath and torrents swell
Burn the touch of ashen souls
Here you’ll lie in words undreamt
Lost to the silence you stole
Prophets in their wisdom preach
Kings in their ideals command
Yet fate crowns not a verse’s slave
Who bears not the weight of hallowed lands
For time tells not of songs unsung
Nor life endow a devil’s hand
With clarion call of Heaven’s tongue.
In hope these words were borne
Yet in lies our lines lay torn
My song but a war unwon
A verse unseen to eyes born hollow
What veil or verity be writ in games?
When joy in names be lost tomorrow
On sleepless roads the nameless go
And O, do the foolish cry;
“Life and lyric is ours to know!”
Truth- a play for a corpsing crowd
Marred and mirrored – though few
dare dream of why
As life be cast to dance and dice
Bow not to calumny nor cradled curtain
Bear the verse till dawning light
Of this alone I stand certain
And while the fool’s verse be played
each word wrought and blind
though the soulless truth be laid
tomorrow’s word
is mine
