Maung Saungkha in a holding-cell waiting area at a court in Yangon in December. Saungkha is on trial in Myanmar for writing a poem about having a tattoo of the country’s president on his penis. Photograph Courtesy Aung Naing Soe

The Burmese poet Maung Saungkha does not have a tattoo of Myanmar’s President on his penis. At least, that is what he has told everyone who has asked him recently. He may soon have to prove it in court. The twenty-four-year-old’s anatomy became a matter of public interest on October 8th, of last year, when Saungkha posted a short poem, titled “Image,” to his Facebook page. The most staid translation reads like this:

On my manhood rests a tattooed portrait of Mr. President My beloved found that out after we wed She was utterly gutted, Inconsolable.

In its brief coverage of Saungkha’s ordeal, the international media has seized on a more salacious, and catchier, version: “I have the President’s portrait tattooed on my penis/ How disgusted my wife is.”

Weeks after Saungkha posted the poem online, I went to see him in a holding cell, where he was handcuffed to a police officer and awaiting trial for defamation. Saungkha, a slim man with boyish features, told me, through a translator, that he did not think his words would stir up so much trouble. He cited Myanmar’s abolition of censorship and its transition to democracy, a process that began in 2010 and culminated, or seemed to, on November 8, 2015, when voters pushed the Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi and her party, the National League for Democracy, into power for the first time. “Even though it is said we have freedom of expression, now they charged me because I wrote a poem,” Saungkha said. “So I was surprised.”

Poetry has long played a political role in Myanmar, and many poets there before Saungkha have been sent to prison. In the early part of the twentieth century, nationalists used verse to rouse those who struggled for independence from Great Britain. Many of the activists who participated in the country’s widespread pro-democracy protests in 1988 were also writers and poets. Saungkha himself is an interfaith activist, and a member of a youth group connected to Suu Kyi’s party. That party, the N.L.D., tapped several poets to run for parliament in November, and eleven were reportedly voted into office. After the election, I travelled to Naypyidaw, the capital, to interview one of them, Tin Thit. I told him that his story was remarkable: a poet who defeated a former defense minister at the ballot box. Tin Thit did not seem to find it very surprising.

But the rise of democracy in Myanmar has brought some unexpected changes. One of the ironies of life under an authoritarian government is that it can be easier to navigate what is and is not permissible than it is when freedom comes. Only a few years ago, Saungkha might have published his poem in a local journal, perhaps under a pseudonym, so as to avoid detection—or he might not have published it at all: writing a poem using the words “President” and “penis” before 2010 would have been practically unthinkable, or at least very daring. In 2008, the poet Saw Wai was arrested for an anti-junta verse weakly disguised as a Valentine’s Day poem. Titled “February 14th,” the poem sounds like something from a bad romantic comedy. “You have to be in love truly, madly, deeply and then you can call it real love,” one of the lines reads. But, as authorities eventually discovered, the poem was an acrostic that called out the leader of Myanmar’s junta. The first letter in each line spelled out “Power Crazy Senior General Than Shwe.” Saw Wai was sentenced to two years in prison.

When Saungkha posted his poem online, it was noticed by Hmuu Zaw, the director of the office of the President, Thein Sein. Hmuu Zaw is a prolific Facebook user, and quickly posted a rant about the poem, in which he warned that Saungkha should be prepared to take responsibility for what he’d written. If there is any connection between that post and what came next, it has not been proven, but police showed up at Saungkha’s house that same night, looking to arrest him. Saungkha fled before the police arrived. “Bard on the Run, Dodging Defamation Over Risqué Rhyme,” a headline in the The Irrawaddy, a local magazine, declared.

Saungkha went into hiding, but he continued to post on Facebook. “You can arrest only the poets/ Not the poems/ Never,” he wrote in late October. Two weeks later, three days before the election, he was arrested. He was attending the trial of student activists, who had been rounded up for protesting a controversial education law. Eyewitnesses say Saungkha was taken by plainclothes officers, moved to an unmarked vehicle, and driven away. “That day was a really noisy day,” one of the lawyers on his defense team told me, describing the people who took him as “not police, just, like, mafia.” Other activists chased after the men who arrested Saungkha, he said, describing the scene as comical. “It was really funny, you know.”

Arrests had been on the rise in the run-up to the election. In October, as police were looking for Saungkha, two people, a humanitarian worker, Patrick Khum Jaa Lee, and an N.L.D. supporter, Chaw Sandi Htun, were charged for separate Facebook posts that allegedly defamed the military. In each case, the charges cited Article 66(d) of the Telecommunications Law, which spells out violations for online defamation. The maximum penalty is three years in prison. (Khum Jaa Lee and Chaw Sandi Htun have since been given six-month sentences.)

Use of the Internet in Myanmar has soared in recent years. In 2014, SIM cards, once a luxury item, became widely affordable, after two foreign telecommunications firms, Qatar’s Ooredoo and Norway’s Telenor, launched new networks in the country, creating competition with state-backed Myanma Posts and Telecommunications. The chip-sized subscription cards can now be bought on the street for less than two dollars, inserted into smartphones, and hooked up to one of the three networks in a matter of minutes. Soon after the new firms arrived, seemingly everybody was online, from lawmakers to Buddhist extremists to former generals and poets. Myanmar’s Minister of Information was dubbed the “Minister for Facebook” on account of his frequent posts. One former M.P. self-published a book consisting entirely of his Facebook posts. According to a 2015 report put out by PEN American Center, Myanmar has the fastest-growing Internet market in Asia. “Their country has leapfrogged from near silence and isolation to a connected, smartphone society: more people now have mobile phones in their hands than electricity in their homes,” the report says.

Facebook is one of the most popular social media services in Myanmar, along with the messaging app Viber. But, as in neighboring Thailand—where “liking” a post deemed defamatory to the King can get you in trouble—the platform is a blessing and a curse. The government has had difficulty controlling hate speech that swirls online and erupts into real violence. And it has provided the authorities with a new way of monitoring what people are saying. Myanmar has a population of roughly fifty-one million, but Facebook has made it feel like a much smaller place.