Ode to My Inner Child

Ritual and Ruin took me 10 years to write and 4 years to get right. There are poems in here that I first wrote when I was 16.

​

This book is basically what survived after a few dormant poetry blogs and a few more failed attempts at crafting a book. It took a while, but eventually I realised the process was the story.

​

I found myself reading through the poems again and one day I saw my story clearly in the decadent dream of migrant melancholy. Ritual and Ruin needed to be an ode to the inner child and his struggle to stay alive, the boy I was before the true beginnings of my life.

The Ritual​

Art has always been my outlet, even if that meant buying dollar store superhero colouring books and cheap crayons to scratch an itch during a creative block on a university student's budget. 

​

I used to write myself long letters on a PalmPilot I had in my teens. That transitioned to poetry and stories. I used to sketch​ in the margins and buy sketch pads whenever I came back to Canada in the summer. I've found a few more ways to create since then, but the Ritual always remained:

​

Stop and look, stop and listen, stop and feel, then make something out of it.

​

I hoarded all of the evidence from my devotions, and once I dusted them off the final time to craft this book, I knew had to make something of them.

The Ruin​

So I ruined it all. None of these poems are pure, none of these images are pure. Everything is manufactured to tell the story I think my inner child would want.

​

I rewrote all the poems so this is more retrospective than biographic, and the images were chosen based on the weight of my memories rather than a collection of my best. Then I ruined them so that they matched the Jamaican flair,

visual irreverence and vibrancy that my memories of assimilating back into Canadian society hold.

​

The romance of my soul completely ruined the boy who moved back for university. Art altered my path. The ruin is the art.

Visual Poetry

Ritual and Ruin awoke a real obsession of mine too, visual poetry. After playing with the combination of my poems and photos, I started to crave finding different ways of showing off what goes through my mind as I read my work. 

The whole premise of Ritual and Ruin was to reject purism and attack the book as a full expression, and I've been bringing that idea to my poetry ever since.

In short, this book is what my obsession looks like.