On the surface, Hello Poetry is a haven: a digital campfire where voices gather to warm each other against the cold expanse of the internet. A place where the line between confession and creation often blurs, and where the act of writing is not performance, but survival.

But lately, the fire has grown too bright—artificially bright.

They call them suns—badges of appreciation, visible tokens of endorsement. A nice idea, right? Support a poet. Shine a spotlight. But as with all systems that monetize visibility, the spotlight becomes a searchlight—and it stops illuminating truth. It blinds us instead.

The Distortion of the Feed
Let’s be clear: this is not about sour grapes or petty envy. It’s about who gets seen, and why.

When you pay $15 for five suns, or receive them via subscription, you can choose to boost any work. Once sunned, this poem trends. And if you sun multiple works, the system staggers their rise—today, tomorrow, the next. It’s orderly. Predictable.

And utterly devastating to the organic ecosystem of the front page.

On days when these sunned poems stack high, young writers—often screaming silently through metaphors—are buried. Their work no longer rides the wave of genuine engagement. It gets eclipsed by well-polished pieces with patrons, not peers.

I scrolled today through endless sunshine, only to discover—way down below—the voices of kids trying to survive abuse. Strangers admitting they're scared to wake up. Teens reaching out through enjambment because they have no one else. And they were hidden. Flattened beneath an algorithm that rewards polish over pulse, polish over pain.

HePo Isn’t 911—But It’s a Lifeline
We can’t pretend that Hello Poetry is a substitute for emergency services. It’s not. But we also can’t pretend that this space doesn’t carry immense emotional gravity. For many—especially the young and unseen—it is the only place they’ve ever received an honest comment. An echo. A sign that their words matter.

When a trending system sidelines vulnerability in favor of vanity, it commits a subtle violence. It reinforces that unless your work is sunworthy, it isn’t worthy at all.

Let’s Not Confuse Curation with Censorship
This is not a call to cancel the sun system. This is a call to recalibrate it.

Let paid support elevate—but not suffocate. Let sunned poems shine—but not dominate. Let the front page reflect what it always claimed to: the soul of the community, not the size of its wallet.

We can love poetry and refuse to commodify visibility. We can cherish the bright voices without dimming the urgent ones.

Conclusion: A Platform of Conscience
Hello Poetry, if you are listening, understand this:

You’ve built something precious. Don’t let it rot under the weight of your own reward system. Make room for the cries. Make room for the wild, imperfect, confessional, gasping work. Because if we let only the sunned poems rise, we are choosing applause over advocacy.

And some of these poets?
They don’t need praise.
They need an ear to be heard.


Thank you for reading.

Re-post if you agree ❤️

Sometimes when comes sunrise,
I ache like I died.

Something like being stabbed in the heart,
14,967 times with a real dull knife,
Maybe that's what they mean,
When they say love is full of strife.

I need her more than life,
Somedays I let myself die.

Who lurks in dark?
Those corners of life,
Where nothing shines through.
Somebody waiting,
For a door to open,
For a sliver of light to peek through.
Enough for them to spread their wings,
Knowing somebody will see.

Shaped like a haiku—
words packed tight in foreign breath.
The soul never came.


NEW Collection!

https://hellopoetry.com/collection/136302/death-to-hiakus/

This agenda calls for the de-appropriation of haikus in English—a dismantling of a poetic form that, once deeply spiritual and rooted in Japanese culture, has been flattened into a novelty by Western imitation. The 5-7-5 syllable structure, lifted without its linguistic or cultural context, becomes a lifeless shell—used more for kitsch or brevity than meaning.

As a third-generation Japanese American, this critique is not academic or abstract—it’s personal. The haiku, repackaged in English, often feels like a mockery dressed in reverence. It’s cultural cosplay: wearing the form without embodying the spirit. The language lacks the tools to carry the weight haiku was meant to hold—ma, kigo, and kireji don’t survive the translation.

This isn’t rebellion for rebellion’s sake. It’s reclamation. It’s a refusal to let poetic tradition be reduced to a classroom exercise or aesthetic fetish. Through deliberate subversion—anti-haikus, parodies, critiques—the aim is to illuminate what’s been lost and force a reckoning with how easily culture is misrepresented when divorced from its essence.

This isn’t a rejection of haiku. It’s a eulogy for what it becomes when its soul is rewritten in a tongue that cannot speak it.

where the eye understands the light &
the thought is not a forbidden zone
the sand is blue, the escape slow
into quietude

there we discover that
the tears have their own dying
dreams are not birds without sky
the prayers of the earth are heard by the trees

when I take you inside my temples
there the blood boils like a secret
from the depth of the moon

In the winter of
My darkest sadness
A candle glows,
Tiny and so far away.
It gives the darkness
A focal point and I
Struggle my way towards it.

Another candle lights my way.
I don’t know where it came from
But it makes a fearful journey
So much easier to manage,
And I eventually will dance
On thistledown to
The music of the Skylarks
In a sun-filled, cloudless sky.
  ljm