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Inspiration

After Rematch and Stand came this poem, in the same few minutes of nighttime inspiration. Having written two poems about absolute conviction, and being in that mindspace, I took a look back at Who Is That? and Come On In, Dear, and my eyes fell on Queen of Fear.

Who Is That? establishes that “her side” of my personality has been missing a little, yet I wrote stuff from her perspective as a character in Come On In, Dear. So, while in a mindset of defiance thanks to the preceding White Shadow poems, I wrote Feared.

Feared touches on what I mentioned before, describing the narrator, Queen, as being lost and forgotten, damaged and mourned, burned and devoured. It touches on the origin of this side of me, being feared for being different, for being queer, for being odd, for being me. I then take this perspective back to myself, declaring resolutely that this is my story, just like all my poetry. I then dive into what Queen allowed me to do back then: to take control of my own life, to find thrills beyond the normal, to never stop and look back, to forget the pain of life through activity and risk.

The last lines, “An eternal fight against death itself”, can be seen as a statement about the fact that the things I did in life were defying death, challenging it, not necessarily in a suicidal way, but in a thrill-seeking way.

Retrospection

“A long rest from this life”- that line initially had no direct intent, but later, looking back at it, it became clear to me. A long rest, from this life. This is a life I had to give up on, for a handful of reasons. It’s the reason Queen “went missing”.

But it’s a rest, not an end. Again, I did not have any intent in writing this lline, but the more I thought about it, the more it started making sense to me.