I started writing poetry in high school, when my English class had a unit on it. For the most part, though, my early poems weren’t very good and, after writing a few during my first year of college, I stopped. I started writing poems again while in grad school at MIT—albeit not very frequently—and I’ve continued writing them up to the present day.
Rather than organizing them chronologically, though, I’ve arranged them by topic here:
- Early Nature Poems — These poems, written in high school and in my first year of undergraduate are among the earliest that I consider good enough to share. Even so, though have some rather rough edges. They explore spiritual themes that show up again in some of my more recent poetry.
- Cities and Infrastructure Poems — At least since I was an undergraduate, I’ve wanted to find a way to express in poetry my transcendent feelings about cities and urban infrastructure. While I haven’t had much success with this, and intend to keep trying, here are a few initial attempts.
- Mental Health Poems — A good number of my poems since I started writing have been written to express some of my struggles with mental health, including depression and trauma. This group contains what I consider to be some of my best poems, but also contains some much-less-good ones written in stressful times.
- Hymns to the Hellenic Gods — This is a series of hymns to the Greek gods—particularly Hestia—that I’ve written, partly for ritual usage.
- Aeonist Poems — These poems combine some of the spiritual feelings about nature from my early nature poems with themes and references to Aeonism, the religion of the protagonist in Ruthanna Emrys’s Innsmouth Legacy series.
- Historical and Political Poems — This is a set of three poems I’ve written, all addressed to gods, with strongly political messages.
- Catholic-Pagan Syncretic Poems — Although I consider myself somewhere between an atheist and a pagan, my paganism has some strong Catholic syncretic influences, and I’ve written two poems which can be read as either Catholic or pagan.
- Chosen Family Poems — In spring 2018, one of the members of my chosen family, Ember, suggested I write a series of poems about my chosen family. The series still isn’t complete, but these are the poems I have so far.