Poetry
All Poems
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The Man Who Never Died All at Once — New Poems
I’ve lived a hundred lives, none of them simple. I died in corners no one looks — silent deaths, small fractures inside me, one after another, like cracks spreading through glass. But somehow, I kept getting back up — bloodied, bruised, but never broken. Pain twisted itself into blueprints, wounds spun into sharp ideas. I…
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In the Wake of Silence — Jaded
Silence is the loudest thing in the wake of everything I’ve said. The words hang in the air, unspoken, untouched, and I wonder if I’ll ever hear them again. But the silence speaks in ways the words never could, and I listen— even when there’s nothing left to say.
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The Unspoken Backdrop — Jaded
Love is something that makes us feel the happiest alive, but it can lie. When you think you’ve found someone, yet you’re left trying to forget. Days slip by, and still, you miss them. You sit in the past, letting it mold your well-being. What’s better in yourself? Who you were then? Nothing, actually. Tell…
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Inferno — Phoenix Heart
My heart is ticking its last breath for a cause from years ago, no longer shedding a tear, but quenching the flames of anger before your satire becomes a satanic regret.
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I Closed This Book — Phoenix Heart
They acted like they could burn out your light bulb. Like they knew our make and model. It’s a tragedy, jealousy. It started at birth, masked with daily doses of pharmaceuticals and traumatic damage that turned the family into my abuser. Undergoing the worst of the pandemic of post-traumatic stress, I shook through my whole…
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Shattered heart… — An Inconvenient Attachment
Shattered heart… then life feels over. The best of friends gave me the world. I couldn’t grasp how good it was. Leaving you, leaving the memories.
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I left myself to be with you, — An Inconvenient Attachment
I left myself to be with you, surpassing the worst in mind that kept telling me this was bad… listen to your heart.
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I Am a Fish — Freedom
I wonder if I will ever escape. I hear tapping noises. I see fingerprints on my glass bowl. I want to be free. I am a fish. I feel nothing at all. I touch something smooth. I worry if the cat will get me. I am a fish. I understand that I am stuck here…
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About the Author
Vincent Poe is the pen name of Vincent Enrico Magnani, an independent poet and author born and raised in Western Massachusetts. He is twenty-nine years old. He has been writing since he was fifteen. He grew up in Holyoke, Massachusetts. He started writing on the floor of his bedroom with a composition notebook and no…
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Closing
If this book felt familiar, you are not alone. PTSD does not require war to be real. Sometimes it comes from homes and names and rooms and people who should have known better. Sometimes it comes from being young in a place that was supposed to be safe and learning, before you had the language…
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What Remains
He finishes the book on a Tuesday. He does not know it is the last page when he writes it. He never does. The last page always surprises him — the sudden sense that what he has been building has reached a shape. That the thing is now a thing and not just a process.…
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The Forty-Fourth
November arrives the way November always arrives in Western Massachusetts — without ceremony, without the gradual permission that October gives. One morning it is still October: the light is gold, the air is crisp, the trees have not yet surrendered their color. The next morning it is November: the light is lower and grayer, the…
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October
October arrives the way it always arrives in Western Massachusetts — not gradually, not as a single transformative moment, but as an accumulation of small permissions. The temperature drops below sixty for the first time. The trees on State Street begin their work. The light takes on the specific quality that October light has here,…
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Dinner
He does not see his parents often enough. He knows this. He has known it for some time. The knowing has not made it easier to change, which is the specific problem with knowing — it is not the same as doing, does not automatically translate into the behavior it identifies as necessary. He knows…
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The Platform
He is on a call with the developer on a Wednesday afternoon in October. The calls have been happening weekly for two months now. He sits at the desk with the WordVerse notebook open and takes notes in real time, his handwriting getting progressively more abbreviated as the conversation moves faster. The developer is named…
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The Cats
Ghost was his first. He found Ghost at the Springfield Animal Control facility on a rainy Wednesday in April 2020, which was a particular kind of Wednesday in a particular kind of year that most people who lived through it have not forgotten. He had been thinking about getting a cat for months — not…
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What He Built
He has been building for eleven years. He has been building the way you build when no one is going to build it for you — piece by piece, with whatever tools you have, learning the new tools as they become necessary, accepting that the first version will not be the final version and the…
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Still Here
He is still here. He says this out loud sometimes — not to anyone, not even to the cats, just to the room, the apartment, the walls that have absorbed three years of his life. He is still here. He is twenty-six years old and he is sitting at the desk in Springfield in September…
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Still Fighting
What does still fighting look like on a Tuesday? It looks like getting up at 6:15 when the body wanted to stay horizontal until 8. It looks like making coffee before doing anything else because the coffee is the bridge between sleep and functioning. It looks like sitting at the desk and opening the notebook…
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The Night
He will tell you this much. There was a night in Springfield, in the autumn of a year he does not specify, where he was at the desk and the notebook was open and the pen was in his hand and the thing in his chest was doing its worst and the options available to…
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September 20
September 20, Wednesday. He has been having better days. He notes this in the notebook with the same matter-of-factness with which he notes the bad days. The neutral reportage is the practice — not celebrating the good days because celebrating creates a standard the body has to maintain, not catastrophizing the bad ones because catastrophizing…
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Attack, Documented
September 13, Wednesday. He documents the attack the way he always documents them when he can — in real time if possible, reaching for the pen at the moment the chest tightens. This one starts with nothing. He is at the desk. It is 10 AM. The writing has been going well — one of…
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Rage
He is not depressed. He needs this to be understood. He is not numb, not flattened, not in the directionless gray that clinical depression describes. He is angry. Specifically, precisely, purposefully angry in a way that he has spent years learning to understand and direct and use and not be consumed by. He is angry…
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The Edge
There were days he did not think he was going to make it. He will not tell you which days. He will not tell you the specific dates, the specific hours, the specific sequence of thoughts that arrived and found the door unlocked and let themselves in and sat down and stayed. That information belongs…
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Building
WordVerse is the next thing. He has been carrying this idea for two years — the platform, the infrastructure, the thing the literary world has never adequately provided for the people who produce its most essential content. Writers have Substack and Instagram and the algorithm, which is not infrastructure, is performance incentive for a system…
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The Long Tail
August 19, Saturday. He wakes at 6 and lies in bed for twenty minutes doing the inventory. Not the threat inventory — the other one, the daily one, the practice he has developed of checking in with each part of the body before he gets up, not to look for problems but to be present…
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What They Called It
He is having a bad week. He knows how to name a bad week now. Before he had the clinical vocabulary, before the pamphlet in the waiting room, a bad week was just a bad week — undifferentiated, shapeless, something wrong that he could not locate or address because he did not have the language…
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Spectrum News
The camera is smaller than he expects. He is sitting in a chair in a studio space in Worcester on July 28, 2021, and the reporter across from him — Valerie Bell, firm handshake, specific efficiency — is reviewing her notes. He is not nervous. He reminds himself of this. He has been in harder…
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August 29
August 29, Tuesday. He writes the date and sits for a moment before writing anything else. This is not his usual mode — he writes the date and moves directly into the content, the date as header rather than pause. But today he sits with the date. Twenty-six years, two months, and some days. He…
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Year of woe
A Year of Woe By Vincent Enrico Magnani The last four years have been nothing but hurdles, ambition, and resilience at its purest. Fought battles, stood by the truth in my humanity. If they say no, and it doesn’t make sense, or in better terms, point-blank, then leave it. I forgive my cries and hollers…
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A Year of Woe
A Year of Woe By Vincent Enrico Magnani The last four years have been nothing but hurdles, ambition, and resilience at its purest. Fought battles, stood by the truth in my humanity. If they say no, and it doesn’t make sense, or in better terms, point-blank, then leave it. I forgive my cries and hollers…
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Things
The triggers are not always the things you expect. He has made a list, in the notebook, of the ones he knows. Not for publication — for himself, for the practical management of a life that includes navigating spaces that do not know they need to be navigated carefully. The list is longer than he…
Poem Archive
Browse the complete archive — 409 poems organized by theme.