The following posts will be full sections of my poetry collection called “The Lord of Ruin” written and published in 2019 (available for purchase here). I used the symbol of the swords in the tarot as my foundation to build upon it my spiritual journey. The titles of each section were inspired by the astrological correspondences of the suit of swords and I gave myself room to draw the emotional toll it took to walk through my own ruins as I spoke to God. I gave myself room to be honest with the mess, to be open to point and criticize without guilt, and to honestly have a look at how my own journey looks like through words. It was an interesting experience, and I think due to my Catholic upbringing, I will always feel blasphemous and a heretic for constantly trying to put a face to God, to try to look into their eyes and try to stand up righteously to a force I myself have conflicted feelings for. I think I will always have conflicted feelings for this force that is so very present regardless of names, of descriptions, and my own poetic taunts.
Tag: poetry collection
“don’t bring that negativity here”
I am absolutely enthralled in the art of looking at things from all angles, especially the pessimistic one. I love what the positivity movement is all about but as someone who has been to the bottom, over and over again, it just does not jive with my spirit to be taken by that entirely. My writing explores the darkness, the shadows, because in them there are serious lessons to be learned. Even as it hurts to be bruised watching while others seem to have a better time living, this darkness hides a door that the light obscures. The depths of the soul are not created and shaped by the lightness of being, but of moving through the world with the vigor righteousness of valleys. A river came through here, shaped this landscape, and created new flora and fauna.
Edgar Allan Poe is someone who I could count as my first love, in everything, as strange as that sounds. I spent the majority of the beginnings of my poetry journey trying to master the rhythm and movements in the stanzas of lines to form a poem like that of Mr. Poe. After being introduced to The Raven and then diving through Poe’s oeuvre, I found myself alive and eager to refine the fetus like beginnings of my writing. I amassed a collection of the poems, each looking at everything with a very critical eye, not wanting to sugar coat anything.
This collection I named Humanism in Pessimism. There’s something very human in pointing out what’s wrong, or what could go wrong. It’s a natural re-calibration of the mind that helps determine what reality is really like and hopefully to reshape it to how it should be.
Here’s one: from, “The Glass Half Empty”
The Needle in the Gun
Flagrant speeches harbor stories
written in between lines that hurry
past the carrion withering in your voice
the soul is surprised at every choice
Senselessly feeding quagmires on your shores
impossible within the realms of your shorts
but the vowels are distorted and cut to pieces
where is the translator in all your demons?
Smooth apparatus containing the rage against the machine
bluntly walking but staggering away from me
disappointed consonants divorced from those ‘sometimes’
where is the demon of your good times?
Dismantling objects debasing them just so
getting off and turned on by baseless prose
charging into the flames of the sun
hoping to do away with the needle in the gun
Early Dew of Morning 
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