A Poet Without a Muse (Poem 1 - Internal Damnation)

Last week, I finally played through “Alan Wake.” The game and I have a troubled past. I remember reading about it in 2005 and being blown away by the system requirements. This was going to be the first game to require a quad-core processor and the lighting was going to be so advanced that it would blur the line between gameplay and reality.

There were talks of making the game open-world and having a mystery with branching paths. I was more excited than anything, especially considering it was coming from Remedy, the studio that made “Max Payne.” Something happened during development, though, and the game never materialized.

It wasn’t until 2010 that I finally saw something about the game again. Sadly, though, the platform shifted to Xbox 360 and I just couldn’t deal with that. I laugh now, because that is a completely stupid reason to disregard a game. Still, I got my wish of a PC version and picked it up during Steam’s summer sale for $10 along with “Alan Wake’s American Nightmare.”

So why am I even telling you this? Well, I’ve seen a surprising amount of media recently about writers. The film, “Ruby Sparks,” deals with an accomplished young novelist dealing with relationship problems and writers block. He finally finds the woman of his dreams and it turns out that anything he writes, she’ll do.

Eerie how familiar that is to “Alan Wake,” a game that preceded the film by two years. Regardless, Alan, too, is suffering from writers block and something goes strange in his world. Being taken over by a dark presence, anything Alan writes in his novel comes to life and haunts him.

Well, why can’t I create something as imaginative as this? I remember taking a creative writing class during high school. I used to write a bunch of stupid stories and one was actually in excess of 25 pages! I really am beginning to wonder what happened to that creative spark inside of me.

I feel like a poet without a muse. Nothing has been giving me inspiration as of late. I’ve been blogging online for nearly 5 years now. I started in late 2008 on Screwattack and wrote articles maybe once a month or so. I wasn’t very consistent.

When I shifted over to Destructoid, I wrote nearly every week. I’ve been on that site for a little over two years, so taking just that into account, I’ve written somewhere close to 102 blogs! That is, of course, excluding all of my old Screwattack stuff and the few blogs I’ve written exclusively for Flixist.com.

So it’s sad to say, but I just don’t feel any kind of spark anymore. Whatever creativity and artistry I used to posses has vanished from me. Thankfully, though, I’ve managed to keep documents of my past works.

Over the next few weeks or so, I’m going to be posting some of my older works and hopefully finding inspiration for the future. My only warning for any readers going into this is that some of my older material was dark…and unpolished.

Instead of just dumping random poems or stories and letting people question the intent, I’ll give a small preface to what spurred the writing and then some extended thoughts about how I feel after. Hopefully you all go soft on me, as I’m not particularly proud of a lot of my older writing.



This poem was written during 2004-2005. In that period, I was transitioning to a new high school and failing to make any friends. While I eventually met my best friend, Jim, it took quite some time before I actually let him into my life.

Still, as I walked the halls of the school and found people ignoring me, I had no idea what to think of myself. I assumed something was evil about my presence or that everyone had collectively decided to hate me.

As such, the poem reads like any typical teenage melodramatic blog post would.



Internal Damnation



Drowned by the fires of my own self pity,

My future holds nothing but despair,

As I prance my way through an ever busy city,

All I can see is the length of my fear.



Once were the days were happy was free,

Friends were abundant and full of glee.

How do I lose such a priceless place?

How did I lose happiness from my face?



My years I walk now don’t react too much better,

As the devil speaks hate into my ear every night,

My dreams take a plunge as the world gets wetter,

And my soul disappears in a puff of great fright.



The reaper writes my future with a malevolent joy,

He writes horrible instances like an ignorant boy,

My emotions flow through me like a restless ocean,

And my life slips away in an uncontrollable motion.



How did I lose happiness from my face?

Was it meant to be gone from the start of my days?

How did I lose significance in this place?

Is being dissimilar enough for hatred towards my ways?



My mind might play a role in this game,

And count for the hatred displayed in my name.

Death for me is all self-contained,

And for not my family, I wouldn’t be restrained.



So for my future I see nothing great,

Nothing but endless hours of self deprecation,

Never will I see Heaven’s gate,

All I can see is Eternal damnation.



I am not a fan of this piece. Much like a lot of the poetry I wrote in my teen days, everything sounds like I went crazy in a thesaurus. I still use those, by the way, but not to such a staggering degree.

I always loved when poems rhymed, so I just wrote every other sentence to be a rhyme. I now realize that good writing doesn’t stick to established tropes, so perhaps if I broke some conventions, maybe this poem wouldn’t read like an emo kids wet dream?

Sadly, this still echoes my inner monologues quite well. I’m more aware enough to know that people don’t actually hate me, but I find it incredibly difficult to bond with others. My previous job had a bunch of people that I could easily consider friends, but I’ve lost contact with them.

I even had another group of friends that I hung out with on an almost daily basis, but I pissed that away. A problem with a girl arose and I couldn’t deal with the blow to my ego and self-image. I did what any reasonable lunatic would do; I sheltered myself and abandoned everyone.

So I guess the hold adage is true; history repeats itself. Hopefully at some point I can break the cycle, but I feel like I’m smack dab in the middle of a hurricane right now. Ugh….



If nothing else, this poem has shown me that I can certainly write dark pieces. Maybe my writing moving forward should be focused on tackling darkness? Much like Alan Wake does with his flashlight, the best way to beat shadows is by shining light through them.

If I create horrid scenarios and putrid creatures, maybe I can show myself that my creative juices are still viable. Just because I think dark doesn’t mean it needs to consume my life. Hell, Edmund McMillen has turned some of the most depressing ideas into excellent games.

I think I know exactly the next piece to share, too. That will have to wait a few days, though…