Taylor Swift fans who ordered a physical edition of The Tortured Poets Department will find an original poem on the last page — and Us Weekly is breaking it all down.
According to fans, the poetry was featured in a booklet that comes with “The Manuscript” version of the TTPD vinyl. The stanzas further reveal Swift’s purpose in crafting her 11th studio record, a double album, about breakups, feuds, new love and more, which dropped on Friday, April 19.
“At this hearing / I stand before my fellow members of the Tortured Poets Department / With a summary of my findings,” the poem begins. “A debrief, a detailed rewinding / For the purpose of warning.”
She continues, “For the sake of reminding / As you might all unfortunately recall / I had been struck with a case / of a restricted humanity / Which explains my plea here today of temporary insanity. You see, the pendulum swings / Oh, the chaos it brings / Leads the caged beast to do / the most curious things.”
Swift, 34, goes on to discuss “ill-fated” romances, seemingly in reference to the TTPD tracks penned about her exes Joe Alwyn and Matty Healy.
“Resentment rotting away / galaxies we created,” the poem continues. “Stars placed and glued / meticulously by hand /next to the ceiling fan Tried wishing on comets. Tried dimming the shine. Tried to orbit his planet. Some stars never align.”
Swift further notes that she’s since torn “down the whole sky,” which led to a “dazzling freedom.”
“Then a crash from the skylight / Bursting through / Something old, someone hallowed, who told me he could be brand new,” she adds. “And so I was out of the oven / And into the microwave. Out of the slammer and into a tidal wave.”
She adds, “How gallant to save the empress / from her gilded tower / Swinging a sword he could barely lift. But loneliness struck at that fateful hour / Low hanging fruit on his wine-stained lips. He never even scratched the surface of me. None of them did.”
In quotation marks and ending with an exclamation mark, Swift notes that, in summation, “it was not a love affair” but instead a “mutual manic phase.”
“It was self-harm. / It was house and then cardiac arrest,” the poem goes on. “A smirk creeps onto this poet’s face / Because it’s the worst men that I write best.”
In TTPD, there are multiple allusions to Alwyn, whom Swift dated between 2016 and 2023, and Healy, with whom the pop star had a brief fling in spring 2023. The 1975 frontman, 35, got a heads-up about the musical references, per insiders.
“Matty still thinks very highly of Taylor but we were all nervous about what she might have said on the album,” a source exclusively told Us Weekly. “Matty has struggled with life in the public eye, and he’s been doing really well, but the last thing that he needs is for every Swiftie in the world to think he’s a villain.”
Swift has since moved on with NFL star Travis Kelce, the apparent inspiration for romantic TTPD tracks “The Alchemy” and “So High School.” The Grammy winner reiterated that she is over her exes in a social media message posted on Friday.
“This period of the author’s life is now over, the chapter closed and boarded up. There is nothing to avenge, no scores to settle once wounds have healed,” Swift wrote via Instagram. “And upon further reflection, a good number of them turned out to be self-inflicted. This writer is of the firm belief that our tears become holy in the form of ink on a page. Once we have spoken our saddest story, we can be free of it.”
The TTPD booklet poem ends with the “all’s fair in love and poetry” stanza that Swift previously released when she shared the TTPD cover earlier this year.
The Tortured Poets Department is now available.
