Poetic Perspectives
Welcome to my latest collection of poems--a culmination of my ongoing journey through the world of poetry!
These poems are a blend of my personal reflections and pieces crafted in my years of my bachelor's. Most of them have meticulously reviewed and workshopped by my poetry mentor who'd helped me in shaping them into the creations you see today--so huge thanks to Luigi!
Latest pieces are otherwise reviewed and edited myself.
My poetic muse draws inspiration from my deep-rooted interest in philosophy, particularly in the realms of environmental ethics and morals. It's a journey fueled by the writings of revered poets such as Aristotle, Christopher Dewdney, Ted Hughes, and Michael Fraser (and more!)—although, my list of favorites is ever-expanding at a pace I can barely keep up with...
(Note: Look for the star—it means the poem was successfully published!)
The children of Melwall
The city here used to look as if the guttural
shade of steams had built brick by metal the standing
crusade of a righteous charter. Before a probe
had startled my mother’s carriage that promised
to trench kilometers, I was once a worthy son; then stripped
from long green and every clover that a metropolis had known.
Forward, ankles-deep and twenty knees in boards
of wood would shake the cross of my siblings;
my brother with brittle skin but hearty bones,
my brother with a sprightly mind but foolish eyes,
no thanks would ever weigh enough to the knocking
of that hag’s unhallowed face. At thirteen, starch,
iron-like gore had become the lines of my palms,
my untalented arm would mirror the steam and shade
of the city; I had become built by brick and metal,
like Melwall; the convicts of every back street
and the mocking Capes that go to bat for the dirt-poor,
absurd dickheads of every manor and girls dressed
as Harriette Winthrop. I do not feel good about it,
but a half-devil tamed with only the silver lining
of gold and its children deemed finer than to remain
a servant of a metropolis starved from birth.
The idea of a nuclear embrace
Just pass. Enough swimming! I will slip through my own fingers during the beginning of my time and you will embrace your own. Does it torture the whims of neural choreography? Puppet-on-puppet with strings of perception. The puppeteer or the puppet? Real. They are real! Wind-crossing oceans dance against the tips of white strings and thunderbolts ride on the images of black and grey. Freedom’s always bound in chains; how are we sure that dawn will follow every night? It is within this negative space that fills the problem of green; the nails, the blanket and the idea of a nuclear embrace. If our knowledge is tied to facts that are not proven, images that may not hold true and real; how could this accidental flair of lift be liberated from freedom?
WHAT YOU KNOW is true
“A bad man cannot pass from happiness to misery, for the pleasure of tragedy is the pleasure of vigorous excretion.”
The design as man is to receive pleasure from tragedy with its hunger
for tears. See, those who choose to abuse (or arouse) the animals of this place
are masked wearing the thin skin of a cat. They chase the slow green
of some leaves and bare out poison for babies crying milk to suck on,
but if man can discern his place and find his steps, not mistaking the shade
of fire as a cheer and never driven by the perception of a concrete jungle,
the feel of wood would not become plastic and our lungs will not eat the tar
of our own collision.
How to save a life
You should know by now
that feeding on a lizard’s tail
won’t turn you into a God.
It won’t grow wing-shaped crowns
or taste slippery, like pickles
drowning in cherry-soda.
The living room cradling adults
are dead, you don’t have time
for pop-tabs to explode or to bristle
your fatigue or to grope at someone’s
fork.
The white is so fat with discharge
that you can’t see beyond the whiff
of sharp tongues. If you just spit
in the choke-hold, the snow won’t go far
up-deep.
Snake, separate your own bones;
eat your own scales, swallow stiff
and far until the blades of it cut through
the black box—it shouldn’t be too hard.
Deadlift pt. 2
Stop all that crying, my nineteen-year-old just died.
Sick everywhere, orange coating abominable weight,
stretching grass-eyes and twitching beans under hairy
sticks, his panting chats felt tender underneath white-
sheet knuckles. Thirty past seven with seven more ticks;
what a pity, my shoulders couldn’t carry the poison in
his sideburns. But how hard is it to even forgive his
brother? Overtired burials never felt so slack-spined
like the shape of his brittle spine. My bicep won’t lift
that dead weight or sweat breath. It’s too heavy.
Green is for 7
It’s the way counterclockwise doesn’t feel safe
and
how math textbooks are red and not blue;
the calefaction of July is just as cold as a sugar-
free Red Bull. The nervous system of black’s
shade is just as horizontal as a house ceiling
(when viewed from below) but sinking from
the cold is better than screaming in a fire,
an
elbowed road is safer than sitting at the far-end
corner of a window-side double- deck bus
5 x5 = 25 is blue but black death isn’t black. The
smell of rain is just asphalt. Thunder! an applause
from someone’s god. Put this all in slow-motion
and
it’ll still never be slower than a winter night.
But you probably already know that green is for 7.
Shallow religion
Who is to say that we are masters of the earth?
Before tomorrow, no mountain will be left
to drain the clouds away and no stream of river
will ever remember the taste of their roots and rocks.
We have not married the animals that we eat to know them,
nor returned the fin and wing of those that needed it most
to learn the aftertaste of the sinking air. No man can be alive
for September morning to fold their pants and walk barefoot
on the migmatites or the burning gravels of the end. A ripened
sunlight will do nothing but burn the rest of the shelves while
a falcon will only walk until their talons become their grave.
Sick, do not stand on graves and cry if you are not good to walk
the tremendous heaps of sins that you have committed. Be astonished
and tell the world what you have done. An uptick of unsinking volcanoes
cry while their waters burn from east to west.
“And I saw” the Woman Clothed with the Sun as the Geese come out
for spring. They will hide again in master-crafted salt marshes or hike,
with bravery, across soiled streets to meet the underpart of a black,
heavy, murderous tire.
And then another man with a golden censer will come and stand
broken at an altar. He is given much incense to offer, with the curtains
of the crime and the moon under his feet.
A world (NOT) made for us
To reinvent the human, we must first uncave the earthly mind—
not to steal the rumbles of tailings or measure the weight of sand,
but to put back the roots of a half-tree; to sing of the end of the world
while children count their fingers to every breath of a dead fish.
No one is capable of making a ladder to climb to the next world,
or to share a blanket with their teacher. The seven sin will not exist
for human’s atrocities have created instead a hundred-odd
hydroelectric plants to breathe air. The invention of democracy,
the nine-to-five shifts, Easter and the richest man in the world
will be swallowed and sunken into itself.
The supermarkets will become a cemetery, no one ocean more
will ride its wave underneath empty feet,
bombing sites are just part of the moon’s craters and the lizards
of the desert will find its place in the peak of hills.
Our elbows will rest on top of each other and if you look
at something miles away, you will remember
that we were not meant to eat this world whole. Then, at noon,
you will realise that this world was not made for us.
Write what scares you
Place exile in-between
that chair until it becomes
a continent and your thighs
are nations at war with stillness.
Say: the sky isn’t blue
it’s just a bruise on god’s lip
or
the mating of light when it tries
to fold itself into another body.
Say: silence is circular.
It always comes back to the seat.
You think you’re empty
until something oozes
out of the pores of your brain
and you think--
A letter. A colour. An image.
Not a memory but the circumscription
of what you remember. The constitution!
of writers is just a collaboration
of
cracks,
collisions,
and conjurings—
a circuitry of
what they call craft
is just chaos with cadence.
Don’t stop at the realisation.
Be flat-footed immediately
at the distortion of a page
and admire the distance
of each margin, faint stuttering lines, and how your finger floats to reach backspace
but don’t write too much.
Stay in the frame. Follow—
follow the flow of the fiction
you’re too frightened to finish.
Hallucinate in “Read Mode.”
Fantasise a dystopia
with apocalyptic tendencies
and a bastard democracy
or
go beyond
the realities of non-fiction.
Write
politics,
noir,
body horror,
a memoir,
smut,
an autobiography—
write about blank spaces
with no blank spaces.
Compare
negative capability
with
positive capability.
Make love with poetics.
We are not babies. Our language
is sensical when mixed with the concept
of architecture. We can be safe
in seriousness and take flight with ambition.
Do not take rejection for failure
but as an excuse to become
an accessory to the art. It is:
project, process, product.
But you forget to play. Play—
with the words, pick apart
the page, press past punctuations,
plunge yourself into peculiar patterns.
Punctuate the pauses.
Pulse without permission.
What are you scared of?
The silence that edits you
before you write
or
that even if you scream in ink,
no one will bleed for it?
Fear is a word.
Write what scares you.
An artist is present
Process, product, project.
Be aware of your experience
with sensory experience—think, don’t think.
Approximate the thought process. Art
doesn’t have to be a self-serious thing.
Anti-artists speak a baby’s language:
nonsensical.
Tell them it’s no longer useful to rebel
against the past. Art
needs to be the matrix
of people’s experience.
Language is for the living;
it’s a living thing; harnessed, used—
We are architecture. Art
and decay.
The quiet revolution. The concept of transformation.
I entertain ambition for a reason of being.
Memories occur freely. Freedom is my utopia.
An autobiography of everything I’ve thought.
B222 Issue #5
Intersections, Spring 2025
Black dog, bronze feet
I climb out of a season, belly-skin clenching with piss-coloured bubbles my finger-nails
crave to pop again. The edges of my veins smell like green spice pulsing with dirt
and water; I’m barely sun-bound and clothed. Now, a man comes to me in the shape
of a black dog, wagging a tail in front like I’d seen him before.
There’s a fence that divides us and he says, “Black is your soul. Black is your smile. Don’t be nailed by your own ribs and writhe in His name with a problem so great.”
Green pastures hatch behind me with clouds of sheep where the sun
pronounces itself and the weather foams with rain-bows of simple robed men,
and another man appears with a gentle space who doesn’t look oblivious to human
violence. And it’s His feet like burnished bronze that stays close to the green without
moving His tongue. He shines white like He’s seen me before. My bones are chained
and felt beneath a burlap blanket.
I know who He is and what kind of army breathes behind His side of the fence.
I know the man behind me is the beginning.
I know that beginning was the word and the word became flesh and dwelt among us.
“The virus of heaven is dark-spined. They hide behind wasted puddles.
Black is (y)our soul. Lead the waters with me.”
There’s no playing with this dog. And near the bark of his black fur he reaches.
To make no decision is to choose. To continue to strike this diabolical bargain is to fall
into the hallucination of the horror.
Fame, riches, glory.
“It shall come to pass at that time to punish the men who are settled
In complacency, who say in their heart that He will not do good nor will He do evil.”
I sit at the top of the wood fence, eyes closed. I feel its shape’s inaction till day
Rises; then, under Mary’s gold, the green becomes a hole where the man robed in white
turns His heel.
Blessed, rather, are those who hear the word of God and keep it.
The shape of a man has no sections.
The black dog curls into me with raw teeth. “The Kingdom of God has no fences.
The fence belongs to me.”
Published: B222 2025 Issue, pg. 20
little deaths
From my mouth,
a crooked log
spits in return.
I drink their tinted thirst
while their seeds
become ashes;
I trace the limited
presence of a concern
until it completely
vanishes and problematise
the hopelessness
of a threat.
Do you name your trees?
How old is it?
The moan of a machine
and bubbles of a cannon
are just enough
to make a failure.
Some are half-cut
and unwhole,
nervous hands
and everything.
The little deaths
of the squirrels,
monkeys, and birds
can’t avoid the cars—
we go even faster
in hazardous carved
roadlines.
To (THE) brimstone
Don’t be afraid. I was killed by God
in the horrors of Creation. A place far
from the system of a prayer, pressed
against the skin of A people. And light
in His name; a virus of angels with no pores
protecting the retched joints of a black
doorway. Spheres, wheel and whirlwinds,
dead (again) by the roast of a rock’s sundry
flesh-holes. Goodbye goodbye. The burned
chirped under Brimstone sparks sucking
the sun and it was petal ashes that carved
wooded wheel-blocks of runes, right.
Francesca Pérez came out innocent and safe
when she answered. Jesus I was 12 when
her gassy-forehead laughed at me and 5
others squeaked Kickers to make a fart
to bully me. I’d wished I shot them well,
but this is what happened: the children
of the Lord came out innocent. Meanwhile
my forward foot and body leaned right to drag
my hollow stomach into the pits of a hell.
This is the Brim where God’s children go
she says. So my breasts become gone and finger
nails riding along the tips of high-waisted ticking
flames, my 2 very eyes popping like a hereditarian
clicking noise. My hand purred for the palm
of my fake Father when I fell 7 levels deep
and his big feet watched me get dirty. He says
you double-minded little girl My heaven
will not open unto you for I cannot love you.
A rock's bottom
I'd probably be a rock if I was reborn.
Bedrock. Uh beating breads of gravel.
Bench-
Pressing molecules of a sand. Pasty little
Things you know less than tar but gluey
Like bastard sugar. The only difference is
That I wouldn’t care
About how heavy it is because it isn’t.
I’d lift wet apartments and darken my layers
Pressed against an empty cliff or something(?)
Kinda like me. Wobble. Cob. Cobble?
Cobble-
Stone! It’s so cold. Hold hands with me
I’d say the grass crusts would tickle
My horizontal motions and the big
You know the thing that moves the clouds
Would drive and rape flat roads so
I could feel like a storm.
But I wouldn’t be a big rock. There’s something
About being small that makes people want
To throw you. Yeah
I want the edges of a mare’s tail to lick the moisture
On my gray-black-green-yellow-brown-red feet. Or
Like break the tint off an abbey. I’d a bad rock.
Ones seven-year-olds would fracture their foot parts for.
Shale gets shit on for showering in mud and being so thin.
Where orange knows my name
Today, I was higher than the sun
in a world of orange ignored by steel
bones.
There were sticks of moist grass
born in divisions of mist and floating gas—
pastures of snow
trickling against the edges of small
dunes and standing birk-
wood and saddled stallions
evaporating quickly to merge
with alien blues.
I had to ignore the growing pains
of my pit when I passed the Moon
Family Pond swept down
a hill cornered by my Father’s models
the Earth fell and I rose between the wheels
of his car and the windows of brushstrokes,
I knew by then I should’ve been born here.
After there was nothing
it was my body that sank into a couch shredded in salt
amusing a scream with a Christlike prayer. Until I gave Him my eyes,
the prayer was heavy and saline to grip me away from this Earth. No longer
could I feel the sanity of my own false grinning of a “love” that I commanded.
It was my stinking hands that threatened to massage the knife with moist.
Then, I was flowered in stiches of a vintage green special from Kensington
with hooked feet among some rubble a week later; blinding wet and floundering
black aside the dew of that night I imagined glistening beyond hungry, hungry.
And when at last I found him, I stopped. I’d become rusty and ugly and bare
and self-conscious but he sat there grippingly doused in a gin slightly too clean
with a mystery naked in gold bracelets and silver piercings. It was Italian.
The midnight rocks swayed into the heat of an annual fair then into flavourful spices.
And it was so horribly over-powering, the mind and body of a man.
The Saturday night “parties” merged into doing my hair this and that way
to wearing my face so bare the under-pores of my nose couldn’t stop to swallow
him whole. I was solid silver. He was braced in gold; sweet and sour-soused.
A woman made to be the night’s last witness. A man born of some first light.
I became safe in the barriers of his skin, unglazed yet prickled by tender hairs.
MORE COMING SOON...
ADDRESS
2445 The Collegeway, Mississauga, Canada, ON
L5L 2E5
PHONE
+1 (437)-262-8648
(ONLY for business inquiries)
