On a cold night in east London, 21-year-old performance poet Sam Browne tells a packed room about his second bout of psychosis. 'I was in Morocco at 18, completely alone, and I started to feel that things weren’t real,' he says. 'It got so bad that one day I turned to a random person and told him I was thinking of killing myself. He just said back to me: “Don’t do that – you’ll miss the sunset.”' Browne breaks the tension by launching into a poem inspired by the experience, You’ll Miss the Sunset. 'The world is so beautiful, the least you could do is stick around to watch it,' he says with a hint of a smirk. 'But it’s all shit, all of it, isn’t it?'
The crowd of mostly young men and women laugh as Browne gallops through the rest of his set, tackling everything from sexual assault to accidental overdoses and male loneliness. Talking in plain terms and swearwords more than lofty metaphor, he is a poet with a mission: to change the way men see themselves and support each other. 'We need to offer up an alternative masculinity from the one that boys have been trained to live,' he says. 'If one way that can happen is through poetry, I’m very happy to lead this movement.'
Browne’s blend of brutal honesty and droll observation has made him a viral sensation. Counting over 160,000 followers on Instagram, and with videos of his performances regularly attracting millions of views, Browne has turned his teenage experiences into energetic performance poems that aim to skewer perceptions of mental health and masculinity. It is only 18 months since he began regularly performing at open mic nights, but he has already quit his job as a teaching assistant to tour the country and perform full time. However, it has come at a price. 'I’ve had death threats, people calling me slurs online and even Andrew Tate posting a meme of me on his X account,' Browne says. 'I have a love-hate relationship with social media because you don’t know what you’re going to get when you open your messages.'
Browne’s tactic first gained traction in February 2025 when he released a video of his poem Silly Billy, which quickly gained more than 15 million views. The poem weaves together statistics on sexual violence with nostalgia-inducing tales of school mischief, concluding with an anecdote about a character, Billy, who assaults a girl at a party. One refrain in particular caused the poem to go viral: 'Billys aren’t evil, they’re failures of a system / A misguided form of discipline.' Browne says, 'I wrote it when I realised how prevalent sexual assault is. I spoke to my female friends and found out it’s something that has happened to almost every woman. I was just ashamed that I had to actually see their pain to understand the extent of it, and the poem was trying to find a different way to get that message across. Rather than just singling out a perpetrator as a rotten apple, it’s actually a rotten system.'
The poem soon reached far-right circles, causing Andrew Tate, a leading proponent of the manosphere, to mock it in a now-deleted post. The backlash was so severe Browne thought he might be entering psychosis once again. 'I was receiving absurd levels of hate and dissociating. It got really bad,' he says. 'But for every death threat, I would get far more people messaging me to say my work had changed their perspective. Although the experience was awful, they were watching and the poem was cutting through.' Browne may not fit most people’s image of a professional poet – he had never read or engaged with poetry seriously until 2025. But his raw, honest approach is resonating with a generation seeking new narratives around masculinity and mental health.
