Beau Taplin The Awful Truth - Upd

Consider one of his most famous fragments: “And you tried to change, didn’t you? I tried to change, too. But we were just two different people pretending to be the same.”

This is the poem’s central image. Letters—physical, tactile artifacts—are not practical sources of information. One does not read old letters for news or logistics. Taplin selects “letters” because they are relics of intimacy. The act of reading them is a private, archaeological dig into a dead language of affection. Crucially, the verb is present habitual: “I still read.” This implies a compulsive, almost addictive cycle. The speaker is not remembering fondly; they are administering a controlled dose of the past. The letters are a known quantity; they contain no surprises, only predictable echoes of a self that no longer exists. This is not curiosity. It is a ritual of self-harm. beau taplin the awful truth

Compared to classical sonnets (e.g., Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese ), which catalogue the specific textures of love, Taplin’s poem is anti-specific. Compared to modern confessional poets like Sylvia Plath, who used elaborate metaphor, Taplin uses erasure. He strips the language down to its barest bones. This is not a failure of craft but a strategic choice. The numbness the speaker feels is reflected in the poem’s aesthetic: flat, unadorned, and monosyllabic. The form mimics the content. Where a Romantic poet would write a hymn to a forgotten letter, Taplin writes a clinical diagnosis of dependency. Consider one of his most famous fragments: “And

The poem’s opening line functions as a performative qualifier. By warning the reader that what follows is “awful,” Taplin primes the audience for a confession of lingering romantic attachment. Convention dictates that the “awful truth” would be something like I still love you or I am not over you . This rhetorical setup creates a false expectation. Taplin exploits this narrative convention to make the actual revelation—about numbness, not love—significantly more jarring. The “awfulness” does not stem from a broken heart, but from the existential horror of emotional atrophy. The act of reading them is a private,

On the surface, it’s a line about breakup advice. But read it again. The awful truth here is that love does not guarantee loyalty. Love does not fix things. Love, in fact, can coexist peacefully with abandonment. That realization shatters the fairy tale we’re sold from childhood—that love is the anchor that holds everything in place. Taplin tells us the opposite: love is often the very thing that makes leaving so devastatingly possible.

For more of his work, you can find his collections like and Bloom on Amazon or Goodreads .