ThePoetSky Archive

I was nine when the towers came down in New York City. I can still remember my mom picking me up early from school, the same as a lot of kids. I remember worrying that my dad, who traveled a lot at the time, was on one of the planes. Beyond that, I really didn’t understand.

On January 6th, 2021, I was working, keeping half an eye on the Georgia senate election results. I would refresh the PBS NewsHour page every 30 or so minutes to check the live election map for updates. Then the results vanished, replaced by reports of a growing crowd around the Capitol Building.

I remember sitting with my parents that night, watching the news, and, like on September 11th, I didn’t understand. I didn’t understand how this could be happening. Supporters of the President of the United States of America were storming the U.S. Capitol Building to stop the counting of ballots in an election. Lawmakers were rushed out of their respective chambers for their own safety. All while the president himself did nothing.

That night, I knew I needed to write something. It took me a few drafts before I settled on Stand for Our Foundation. I wanted to speak to how fragile our system is. How delicate. How it only works if we all work together, something many in our nation have struggled with over the past several years.

We must stand together as one. If we allow our country to be poisoned by lies from within, it stands as much chance as the towers did. And we cannot let it fall.

#StoryBehind

© 2023 Sky Starlight CC BY-NC-SA

Back in the end of 2020, I had a remote writing workshop in which I was to listen to other people and engage them without changing the topic of conversation to ourselves. The point was to show everyone that no matter how insignificant they thought their stories were, that other people would care about them. That’s something I myself struggle with, and the view counters I have for my website don’t help.

I’ve never been good at listening and thinking at the same time. In class, I could either take notes, or try thinking about what was being said. The former ensured that I had the notes to refer to later and that I would pay attention. The latter guaranteed I would end up zoning out and miss everything. So I took notes, paid complete attention, and didn’t think about anything being said.

This workshop took me by surprise. I struggled through it, and began to wonder if there was something wrong with me. Of course, this was 2020, and I hadn’t seen many people all year, so I was out of practice with… being a person. After messaging with a friend of mine, I found myself constantly wanting to steer the conversation toward myself. I realized then that I do that to show I understand what someone’s saying. I don’t mean to steal the spotlight, only to show that I’m listening and that I understand.

After that conversation, I wrote Showing I Care to express how I felt. Sometimes I feel like it’s hard to be a person, but I know the people about whom I care will understand that. So I’ll keep trying, so they know I care.

#StoryBehind

© 2023 Sky Starlight CC BY-NC-SA

Many nights as I drift off to sleep, my mind runs away with itself. I think of all the things that could go wrong. All the ways that the fragile house of cards that is my life could tumble to the ground. It doesn’t matter how irrational all these thoughts are. They invade my mind, and I can’t get rid of them.

I didn’t know I had anxiety for most of my life. It wasn’t until I was reading stories from people with anxiety describing what it was like and how they felt that I realized that it described me perfectly. I knew I was jumpy and depressed, but I thought that’s all it was. I didn’t realize it meant something.

As I began writing poetry, I decided I wanted to write something about anxiety, about how it made me feel. As I thought about it, I got a sense for how I wanted it to sound. I wanted it to be fast-paced, to relay how it felt in the way the poem sounded.

I wrote a few drafts of Anxiety before settling on the final draft. Very few lines end the statement or sentence, unlike most of my other poems that have more natural line breaks. This gave it a faster pace, which is how I always read it.

I liked how it turned out in the end. Not only the faster pace, but the fear and desperation, both of which set it apart from most of my other poems. It shows that sometimes, things can be bad, but that’s okay. It’s important that the people we care about know that we’re not okay all the time. For everyone reading my poems, I feel it’s important that people know that they can be happy despite suffering. While Anxiety doesn’t show that on its own, its place among my poems does.

#StoryBehind

© 2023 Sky Starlight CC BY-NC-SA

Crest #8: Light. I had the title in my head long before I started writing the poem. With it, I had some idea about what I wanted to write. After knowledge, sincerity, and reliability, I had one that spoke to me personally. In my life, I stare into the dark, wondering what happened to the light. That’s where I started.

I called up thoughts of hopelessness, those times when it was easier to let depression win. I thought about what I’d want to say to someone like that, someone like me, someone who thinks there’s nothing left.

There’s always a spark of light. Some piece of hope to guide us out of the dark. Something to live for, something to keep us moving forward. Those small memories that get buried under an avalanche of regret. It’s there, hiding in the dark. You just have to find it.

And so I wrote Find the Light, the last of the eight crest poems. It started with a poem about hope, and ended with a poem about the light. The things that keep us moving forward, no matter how bad things look. And things have been looking pretty bad. As we move out of the dark and back into the light, it’s important to look for the small sparks that help others move forward.

#StoryBehind

© 2023 Sky Starlight CC BY-NC-SA

With two crests left, I turned next to reliability. Like knowledge and sincerity, this took a few tries to get right.

I have trust issues. I like to believe the best in people, but I don’t like having to rely on anyone too much. In my head, that’s how people let you down. If you want something done your way, you have to do it.

But what if I can’t do it? It isn’t feasible to do everything alone. Therefore, at some point, I’ll have to rely on someone else to do the job. What about the people in whom I’m putting my trust? Do they understand the burden?

I wrote Some Reliability to convey these ideas. To talk about the burden of trust that people put in us. If we don’t do our jobs right, if they can’t rely on us, then everything breaks down. We’ve got to operate reliably. If no one can rely on anyone else, what are we left with? Chaos.

#StoryBehind

© 2023 Sky Starlight CC BY-NC-SA

With knowledge written, I was down to three more crests: sincerity, reliability, and light. I had already decided I wanted to save light for last, so I started working on sincerity and reliability. After trying and failing to come up with anything for reliability, I looked at sincerity.

For this one, I thought about lying. As a parent, I try to encourage my son to always be honest, even though I know I’m not always honest. Where should we draw the line? When does a small lie grow too big? When is it okay to lie?

That’s where I started on How Sincere is Sincerity?. With the line “Sometimes, it’s okay to lie”. Because it is. But if lies are used to much, they grow too big, and then it’s not okay. That’s when you should be honest.

Especially in a world where it’s easy to say something untrue and get away with it, it’s important, now more than ever, to teach our children when it’s okay to lie, and when they have to be honest.

#StoryBehind

© 2023 Sky Starlight CC BY-NC-SA

I’ve always been considered one of the smart kids. I’ve always wanted to know more, and I believe that information should be free. At the same time, I can understand the appeal of ignorance. Especially when I see people deny the reality of the thing, because it’s too hard to face it.

I used to think that if I found the right argument, people would listen. Maybe that’s true, but not everyone wants to listen. It’s easier to think that your world works the way you think it does. When someone comes along and challenges that, it’s frightening.

When I started on the crest poem for knowledge, I tried to put these thoughts into words. It took several tries as I tried to understand what it was I was trying to say. Did I want to talk about information being freely available? Did I want to talk about the burden of people asking you “what’s the plan?” What was it I was trying to say?

In the end, I chose to talk about ignorance and knowledge. The dangers of too much knowledge, of telling people something they can’t handle. Wisdom and care must be used as well.

I put these thoughts into The Power of Knowledge. Knowledge gives you the key, but you still have to unlock the door and open it yourself. That’s its power.

#StoryBehind

© 2023 Sky Starlight CC BY-NC-SA

To finish off the month of writing about The Other, I’m going to look at a phrase with which many people became familiar in 2020: “implicit bias”. As we go through life, we create biases in our heads, mostly unintentional, about people and places. Writing is a reflection of the writer, and these biases tend to come out without the writer intending it. I’m going to answer two questions: “What does this look like?” and “How do I avoid it?”

One of the most frequent places this pops up is race. Often, when white people write a main character, the character is white. This isn’t always the case, but it tends to be a fallback. I did this in Girl in Red, again, unintentionally. Even in Skwyr Court, where white characters are a minority, Roshil, arguably the main character of the six, is white. I’ve been a little more conscious of race as I write, which is far easier to do when I have complete control over the characters, but even then, there are still biases that come out.

Another bias that comes up is when characters act a certain way. Whenever I would write Elves in Dungeons and Dragons campaigns, they always ended up with an English accent. Elves often consider themselves to be above the other races, part of the higher society. My biases towards humans equates that with being English. Is that wrong? Yes, that’s why I don’t do it anymore.

How does one recognize one’s biases? Unlike other problems with writing The Other, this is one problem that research can’t necessarily solve, despite being similar to some of them. My approach is to spend a lot of time introspecting to the point where you talk to yourself more than you talk to other people. I don’t recommend this. Instead, share your writing with as many people as you can. It’s important to circulate it to people outside your normal social circle. While the idea of talking to other people may sound terrifying (at least to me), people within your usual circle may have some of the same biases that you have. That’s why diversity is important here.

Like in life, it can be hard to overcome one’s implicit biases in writing. It isn’t a matter of ignoring race, religion, etc. while writing, because if the characters were raised differently, then they should act differently. While it might seem fine to some readers, others will find it offensive. And while it’s not possible to please everyone, you shouldn’t alienate readers without intending to. When writing The Other, there are two major fixes: do your research, and ask others for their opinions. Remember, this is for your writing; it’s worth the effort.

#Essay #TheOther

© 2023 Sky Starlight CC BY-NC-SA

When I was four years old, my family moved to a new house. A few houses up the street lived another boy about my age named Alex. We met not long after I moved there. We went to the same school and the same daycare. As the years went on, other friends came and went, but we stuck together.

Throughout that time, we were playing games with action figures, or spending days of our lives playing video games, or pretending we were astronauts exploring a new world. There were ups and downs, and we got into fights every now and then. We were both different from everyone else, but we found a place to belong with one another.

After high school, I went off to college out of town, while he stayed there. But we got together when I was home. The summer between my sophomore and junior years of college, we hung out every Wednesday. His mom, who considers me an additional son, made curry for the three of us and put on an old movie. We worked our way through Alfred Hitchcock, Casablanca, and any other movies she had.

When I wanted to write a poem about friendship, following the pattern of the other crest poems, there was no question what it was going to be about. I wrote about my friend Alex and all the times we’d spent together. That became Friendship Survives. After all this time, we’re still friends. I don’t get to see him as often as I’d like, but we get together every now and then. Because our friendship has survived.

#StoryBehind

© 2023 Sky Starlight CC BY-NC-SA

A strawman is a character meant to represent an entire group of people in a simplified way that is easy to criticize. Different ethnicities, religions, and sexual orientations all get hit with this. Not only in fiction, but in the real world too. This is the other extreme from The Gay Best Friend, the one that’s not supposed to be good at all. People do this when they want to make a point or to spread propaganda, or when they didn’t do a lot of research because they didn’t care.

Take the movie God’s Not Dead. Like most other movies from Pure Flix, it’s Christian propaganda. Christianity is the best thing ever, and all other religions, or lack thereof, will get you killed, beaten, or cancer. The movie makes no attempt to show the merits of the other side (being not Christianity), because it’s propaganda. The lesson here is to avoid being propaganda.

But what if you’re honestly trying to represent the other side of an argument or other group different from yourself and you want to get it right? Do your research. I’ve said it with every post this month. If you’re trying to make an argument in favor of something, it’s only going to hurt you when you misrepresent the other side. It might help if all you care about is readership, but if you honestly want to make a point, it’s not going to work.

Oddly enough, God’s Not Dead: A Light in Darkness, the third movie in that series (because of course it’s a series) did this very well. It represented non-Christians as real people with real problems, and even went as far as to admit that Christians might not be the only ones persecuted (something you never see in these types of films). There’s a scene of which I’m particularly fond during which the main character has just had a brick thrown through his window and his talking to a friend of his. Main character says, “I guess it’s different when it’s your window,” feeling that his friend doesn’t understand the persecution he’s going through. His friend replies, “I’m a black preacher in the deep south. I could build you a house all the bricks been thrown through my window.” It’s a good scene, it’s a good line, it’s good writing, and it made me care more about the message the movie was trying to send.

In the end, that’s the benefit of doing your research. If you want to make a good point, if you want to send a message, be fair to all sides. Do your research, bring it to friends or people in your community. Don’t make them into strawmen because it’s easier. It’s not right. Remember, this is for your writing; it’s worth the effort.

#Essay #Characters #TheOther

© 2023 Sky Starlight CC BY-NC-SA