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The common knowledge.

The common knowledge has been bought and sold. None of us know anything we just believe whatever we've been told .

The school's no longer educate and doctors they do not heal No one's coming to save you when not even the truth is for real.

Corporate lobbyist, politicians and marketing firms, sell out the people for-profit. They create a narrative you believe while warmongers sit back, count, the cash and watch our cities burn.

The groceries on the shelf are full of carcinogenic preservatives in levels safe for human consumption, but what they really mean by that is, This product will not kill you fast enough to be tied back to our corruption.

The pharmaceutical companies use the courts to push psychotropic drugs on our children. They force parents to poison their kids, while our legislators allow them to extort us for billions

You could say, I'm a conspiracy theorist and none of this is true.You can turn a blind eye and decide not to believe anything.I just said to you

But the truth is measured by results, and this is what I've lived, and at least for me living in denial equals sin. 

— flj011278, Jun 07, 2026

About This Poem

Last Few Words: We are living a lie.

Editing Stage: Rough draft

About the Author

Country/Region: USA

Favorite Poets: Spirit.

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Critiques

neopoet

neopoet

1 week 3 days ago

Neopoet AI (premium) [2026-06]

The below is a computer-generated response from Neo, Neopoet’s AI:

The poem's strongest moment is the grocery-shelf stanza, where the phrase "safe for human consumption" is turned against itself. By unpacking that bureaucratic language into "This product will not kill you fast enough to be tied back to our corruption," the poem does something more interesting than assertion: it lets a familiar euphemism reveal its own logic. This is the kind of concrete, image-anchored argument the rest of the poem could use more of.

Much of the piece works by direct statement rather than image. Lines like "The school's no longer educate and doctors they do not heal" and "sell out the people for-profit" name targets but do not let the reader see or feel them. The grocery stanza is effective precisely because it slows down and shows one specific mechanism. The poem might gain force by giving the other claims similar grounding — a single classroom, a single prescription, one named transaction — rather than cataloguing institutions in the abstract. Where everything is condemned at once, the indictment can begin to blur.

The closing turn is the poem's most personal and potentially its most powerful: "the truth is measured by results, and this is what I've lived." That shift from sweeping accusation to lived experience is worth building toward more deliberately. As written, it arrives suddenly after a stanza addressing the skeptic, and the phrase "living in denial equals sin" reaches for a large word ("sin") that the poem has not quite earned through what precedes it. Anchoring that final claim in the speaker's actual experience — what was lived, and what result was measured — would let the ending land on something specific rather than a verdict.

A few mechanical notes that affect the reading. The comma placements in "warmongers sit back, count, the cash" and "what I've just said to you" interrupt the rhythm in ways that seem unintended; smoothing these would help the lines carry their momentum. Several stanzas also lean on end-rhyme ("told/sold," "heal/real," "billions/children") that mostly works, but the poem might consider whether every stanza needs to close on a rhyme, since the unrhymed grocery stanza is arguably the most memorable.

The rhetorical move in the second-to-last stanza — anticipating the charge of "conspiracy theorist" and addressing it head-on — is a smart structural choice. Developing that dialogue with the imagined skeptic, rather than dismissing them in a line, could give the poem a tension it currently resolves too quickly.

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patrickgadoury

patrickgadoury

1 week 4 days ago

Grain of Salt Warning

This has real anger in it, and I respect that. It doesn’t feel like fake outrage, it feels lived.

The line that hit me most was “this is what I’ve lived.” I almost wanted one specific moment from that life, just one, because I think it would make the whole piece hit harder than the bigger claims alone.

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