1. Why Poetry?  
Poetry has always made me feel challenged. When I was younger and I couldn’t express myself properly, or didn’t know how to put things into words, I would use descriptions. I’ve always loved symbolism and imagery and the ability to paint a picture with words. I have a tremendous love for art, for poetry not only helps me to feel challenged, but it also helps me to be able to express myself. And as I got older, it provided an outlet with the things I dealt with in life, things I felt like when I was alone, I couldn’t talk to anybody else about when I felt like no one else was there. I knew that I could have some kind of release in some way, because I always wanted to have good outlets. Poetry has always given me one that I felt would be not only a positive outlet for me, but an inspiration for others.

2. Tell us about your most recent collection.

So my most recent collection is called Renewal’s Virtue: Lover’s Paradox. It is a collection that is an anthology of the first three books that I’ve ever published, put together in the exact order, with the precise imagery that felt like an impossibility or struggle with the publisher I was with at the time. So the collection is incredibly intentional in every decision that I made with it, every single image in that book has some kind of imagery or connection to the poem with which it is attached. The book is a journey from where I went struggling with mental health and anxiety and personal things I conquered throughout my lifetime, to figuring out who I am, and soul searching and understanding what it’s like to come to a place of love, not only for myself, but with the ability to see the world through a completely different lens than which it starts at the beginning. It’s meant to be as immersive, blunt, and descriptive as possible, per my style, personally. And the collection is also meant to tell a story. The poems are meant to be pieces of a larger puzzle, that when you put it together, you get the entire story, the entire experience, and hopefully you take something from it too as the reader, it’s one that I put together again to inspire and to let others know that when they’re in that dark place. You know, there are people as much as we feel alone, and as much as hyper vigilance and anxiety will hold us back and tell us that we are alone, the truth is that we aren’t. 

3. Give the backstory behind one of your poems:

 Poltergeist was written at a time when I had just ended a five-year relationship with my ex-fiancé that ended in infidelity. I had not realized a lot of the triggers that were within me, but one of them, and one that was very deep seated fear and anxiety within me was a desire to be loved, but not only to be loved in general, but to believe myself worthy of love like basically an impossibility, to ask of another, of another human being, to love me to the extent where I could Learn to love myself and what the poem is about is kind of the aftermath of that, where I’m going out, I’m not making the best choices in terms of the people I’m adding to my life. And I felt like I was constantly rotting. People were constantly not hearing me, so they wanted to hear whatever they wanted when I spoke to them. But, you know, they couldn’t dare take a risk. It would, it would be evil for them to take a risk and show that they cared about me. I saw the world through a tremendous lens of hypervigilance. I believe people were fleeting and weak and unable to stand up to the strength that I had internally. That was how I was perceiving the world with all this heartbreak and these these triggers that it taught me that love was something to fear, and I felt incredibly warm and comfortable in that there’s a line in a book that I read growing up that said pain was an old friend, and that always stuck with me, because, in a way, those of us that get used to pain realize that it is a friend because of how it mirrors aspects of ourselves we can change and continually grow as people. You do develop a comfort level with it, and that’s one of the reasons that I love to delve into these topics as an artist. There are lines in the poem like covering up with a jacket to bring warmth to no soul. I’m very, very, very realistic and existential. We have a limited amount of time on this earth, and I want to make the most of it. When I was younger, one of the ways I didn’t think I could, quote, unquote, save myself. So I developed a savior complex, believing I could save the world and impact others, that I was going to make a difference, and that people would care if I wanted to make a difference in their lives. So a lot of promises were made to me and them that were broken. You know, vice versa. People gave up on me. People would push me away or tell me I wasn’t good enough. So I came to believe that the only promise that would ever be kept to me in the world is that the inevitability of life would one day cease and that it would all be over anyway. The poem further on is a larger point of me just falling further and further into this descent and under, and figuring out that the way that I see the world is what I’m creating. I created a poltergeist in the way that I looked at the world. I created a ghost that was made in a curse that I, you know, that I inflicted upon myself with these things, and in my heart, where I desired a home, I had instead defiled what mattered most. I had defiled my foundations and cursed myself into believing that I was going to be haunted for the rest of my life. And towards the end of the poem, it wraps up with a flower floating through the trees with undeniable grace, strumming a harp with the stars seeming, singing of space. And so I come to believe that I’m addicted to it, that things will never change. I won’t be able to establish that. For some reason, I have all the natural ability and power in the world to make any difference in anybody else’s lives except my own, and that feels like such a lost space to be in, to the point where I eventually felt like I was not heeding my warnings, and I was giving my heart away to others to eat on a silver platter. That’s why the final line says that crows devour the hearts of those who failed to heed the warnings of the gallows, because I got to a point where Emotionally, I had hung myself to an extent where I didn’t feel the heart of my chest anymore, and it took so much effort to bring that back within me.  The way we perceive the world, whether that be driven by love, trauma, whatever it is, at our foundations, like at the end of the day, we do have to be the ones to look in the mirror and say, This is my reality, like this is my world that I’ve created. And I can either choose to sit here and continue to hand my heart out and not care that it’s getting stabbed every time, or I could take control and say that I do deserve better, and I need to make that happen for myself.

4. Who are 3 poets you always recommend?
I always recommend Poe. He’s an absolute legend and an absolute tragedy of a human being. Many of my poems delve into the dichotomy of human beings and the darkness and light within ourselves, the things that we all deal with, whether it’s conflict, anxiety, joy, euphoria, love, those kinds of things. So I always like to recommend Poe, because he’s an incredible writer who lived an incredibly tragic life, Neil Hilborn. And I love, I love what Neil Hilborn is doing with button poetry, and his poem, OCD inspired me to get back to writing. I had taken a bit of a break for years, and I never really thought I was going to publish. This is before I published my first book, and I read, or I saw the video online of him reciting his OCD poem, and it hit me so hard. It hit me so hard to this day. It even hits me harder. Probably, I shed tears every time I see that thing. And I think that in modern times, it’s difficult to find actual poets who want to keep the art of it going, who want to keep the poetry and the metaphor and the storytelling and the, you know, the visuals and symbolism going, so I will always recommend him. I don’t know if I have a third that I could choose from. I could give you a lot here. I could give you Hemingway, Da Vinci, and ancient Roman poets. You know, there’s, there’s a lot that I could give you here. But I think that what I’d rather do, honestly, is bring attention to I would recommend any writer or any poet that takes it as an art form and takes it in a way to keep the writing alive. I would rather build awareness for their brand than the Instagram poets who have 100,000 followers, who their brand of poetry is a screenshot of a journal where they wrote the sentence of the last time I spoke to you was 10 pm and it’s morning now, and it’s in quotes, and that’s supposed to be a disgusting poem, and I would rather make my last recommendation one where I recommend to everybody that you encourage good writers, writers who want to put The time and effort into it. Instead of modern day, we go for clickbait writers who don’t have any talent and shouldn’t receive the promotion that others do. I do not care that That’s brilliant. That’s just the nature of that for me. Please support the writers. So I should want to keep this alive. Support kids who want to write. You know, when they go through ELA classes, do whatever you can to support this being a true art form, because my concern is that somebody who writes the way that I do, and with the level that I do, is that one day we won’t have this anymore. And I think it’s important to want to keep this alive for as long as we possibly can. So I want to give my last shout out to those people who have changed the world, and I would just recommend any poet that you see who has put a book together with some kind of intention, effort, and desire to create an art product.

5. I am currently reading….
I am not reading anything. I said that with laughter on my face. I am a full-time substitute teacher who is currently attending a four-year university to become a full-time teacher. So, between teaching kids all day, as well as doing schoolwork and doing everything else I want to do, like write, athletics, paint, Coach, you know, mentor, every other hobby that I have, I have not read anything in a while. The last thing I read was Meditations by Marcus Aurelius, which I would highly, highly recommend. I also love the shop. Genres I could give you, philosophy, action adventure, sci-fi, fantasy, and my biggest genres, I will always recommend them. Please read the old Star Wars books. I grew up on those. There are 300-plus that were not made by Disney. They’re all wonderful. There are so many series growing up. I could tell you one book in particular that I will recommend personally. It’s called Soldier Boys. It is by, I believe it’s Dean Coons, but I could be wrong. He’s one of two authors I always get mixed up because I read so many of them in the genre. And it is a wonderful tale of World War Two from the point of view of a Hitler use soldier who is trained to see the reality of the world and the openness of other people, and his name is Dietrich, and an American soldier who is trained in the same way, but they end up coming from opposite perspectives and ending up meeting each other on the battlefield at one point I will not spoil the story because it’s incredible, but I would highly highly recommend it would also recommend anything by Rick Riordan, whether it’s the Magnus game chronicles the obviously person, Jackson, the Heroes of Olympus series, literally, anything like that. One of my favorite books growing up was Dragon Rider by Cornelia Funke. 

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