About Tao Joannes: American Poet

This is not a newsletter.
This is a beat-up pickup hauling poetry, truth, and trouble across the cracked highways of the American psyche.

I’m Tao Joannes, a writer, performer, and cultural troublemaker with one foot in the sacred and the other in the dirt. I write poems like they’re spells, stories like they’re gospel, and essays like they’re bar fights. I’ve been a kitchen slave on an oil rig, a father praying over a newborn’s first breath, and a student of everything this broken, beautiful country has to teach me.

This Substack is where I document the ride.

You’ll find:

• 🔥 Raw poetry — Spoken or scrawled, haunted by rhythm and memory

• 📜 Personal essays — Messy, unfiltered dispatches from the interior

• 🎤 Performance videos — Sometimes with instruments, live shows, and studio cuts

• 🥊 Cultural commentary — Dissecting the sacred cows and selling their parts for scrap

• 🪶 The myth of self, made public — With all the blood and laughter intact

If you’ve ever felt too smart for your surroundings, too weird for your hometown, or too honest for polite company—
Welcome. You’re home.

Subscribe if:

• You like your poetry with a pulse

• You crave stories that feel lived-in, not manufactured

• You want truth without the Twitter sermon

• You believe art should bite, bless, and bleed

🖤 New stuff of various sorts continuously. Bullshit never.
👉 Subscribe below and join me in the good trouble.

This is my story. There are many like it, but this one is mine.

Subscribe to get full access to the newsletter and publication archives.

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