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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Places
Portland, Maine is the winter he turns twenty- three. He drives up in November with the cats in the carrier, three boxes in the back seat, the duffel bag, and the box of notebooks, which he carries himself up the stairs of the sublet and places in the closet before he does anything else. He…
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People
The world gets to him the way it gets to everyone who feels things without a volume knob. Slowly at first. Then all at once. He is thinking about this on a Sunday in late July — July 23rd, he writes it in the notebook, top of the page, the date that anchors the entry…
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Before the Break
There is a version of him that exists before everything gets harder. He can see it clearly now — the way you can only see the full shape of weather from inside the house, once the storm has passed and the sky is doing something new. He was twenty, twenty-one, building something. Optimistic in the…
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The Archive
He opens the closet and takes out the box. He does this rarely — not because the box is scared exactly, because it is not sacred exactly, but because opening it costs something. He has forty-three notebooks in that box and each one represents a period of his life that was real and full and…
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Freedom
He published his first book at nineteen and named it Freedom because he did not have it yet. Naming a thing you do not have is one way of beginning to want it correctly. He has found this to be true across multiple categories of his life. You name the thing. The naming makes it…
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The First Reading
He does his first reading at twenty. The bookstore is in Northampton — small, independent, the kind of store where the owner knows every book and has an opinion about all of them. He has been in touch with her for three months, since he found her email on the store website and sent a…
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Three Names
He is Poetic Vincent on Facebook. He is Vincent Poe on the books. He is ProphetPoe on the site that is going to change things, if he can keep building it. He chose these names the way he has chosen everything in his creative life — not randomly, not by committee, not by market research…
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The Body
The trigger on Thursday is a song. He is in the grocery store on Boston Road — not his usual one, the one with the self-checkout lanes he prefers because they require less interaction with other humans, but the one closer to the apartment that he uses when he needs something quickly and does not…
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The Reading
He reads at a coffee shop on a Saturday afternoon in October — not his coffee shop, someone else’s, a place in the South End that he has driven past a dozen times and not been in. He parks and walks to the door and goes inside the way he goes into all new spaces:…
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What He Carries
August 16, 2023. Wednesday. He writes the date in the notebook the way he always writes the date — top of the page, matter-of-factly, without ceremony. He has done this for eleven years. The dates form a kind of spine through the archive, a skeleton of time that the writing hangs on. When he goes…
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Holyoke
The city that made him is twenty minutes north on I-91 and a different world. He drives there sometimes — not often, not regularly, but sometimes, when he needs to remember the shape of where he came from. He does not go inside anything. He drives the streets. He sits in the parking lot of…
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The Notebook
The first thing Vincent does every morning is check that the notebook is still there. It sits on the left side of his desk, black cover worn soft at the corners, pages swollen with ink and humidity from the Springfield summer. He does not open it right away. He makes coffee first — black, two…
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The Story Is Still Being Written
I have published seven poetry collections. I have been featured on Spectrum News 1. I have given books away to people who could not afford them, because I always believed that words should reach whoever needs them — not just whoever can pay. I built . None of it came from a perfect life. It…
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The Man Today
Today, I live in Western Massachusetts. My life is quieter than it used to be. But quieter does not always mean easier. Trauma has a way of staying with you. PTSD does not leave just because the circumstances change. Old memories can make simple moments feel heavy. But there is one major difference between then…
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Portland — Never Seen, But Always Heard
I did not arrive in Portland, Maine as someone who had everything figured out. I arrived carrying years of experiences, pain, and memories I had never fully processed. The worst thing that happened to me in Portland happened first. I was raped. I am not going to soften that word. It happened. And in the…
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The Exit
The way I left Holyoke wasn’t cinematic. There was no moment of clarity. No morning I woke up and decided I was done. The decision got made for me — my landlord called a raid on my place, and just like that, the chapter ended the way it began. Without warning. Without a plan. Franklin…
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Franklin Street
I was twenty-two years old when I landed on Franklin Street in Holyoke, Massachusetts. I didn’t arrive with a plan. I arrived carrying the weight of everything that had already begun to fall apart. Somewhere between the person I had been and the person I was becoming, the road bent in a direction I never…
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Mina
After I left home, I coped the way a lot of people do when they don’t know what else to do. I drank. I had a group of eight friends I’d grown close to after high school — people I saw every day, people who became their own kind of family when the original one…
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The Years In Between
After leaving home, life became about survival. When my mother went to jail for thirty days, I moved in with my aunt. Eventually I reached a point where I didn’t have a stable place to go. I became a nanny because I needed somewhere to be. It was not a planned career. It was survival.…
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The Night I Left
I was eighteen years old the night I got into my mother’s car and didn’t look back. I don’t remember everything about that night in the way you remember a normal evening. I remember the feeling. Sad. Lost. Confused. My mind was already working against me in ways I didn’t have language for yet —…
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The Library Where It Began
Every writer has a beginning. Mine happened in a library. I was thirteen years old, sitting in the East Longmeadow library with Sue, the librarian. I had just finished reading The Boy in the Striped Pajamas. The story affected me deeply. It made me think about suffering. It made me think about humanity. It made…
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The House on Ainsley Drive
I grew up in East Longmeadow, Massachusetts, in a raised ranch home on Ainsley Drive. My father was raising four children as a single father. My mother struggled with alcoholism. My stepmother struggled with alcoholism. The home carried challenges that a child should never have had to understand. As a child, I did not always…
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The Red Dictionary
Before there was a pen name. Before there were books with my name on the cover. Before there was a website, a vision, a platform, a purpose. There was a boy locked in a room. Fifteen years old. East Longmeadow, Massachusetts. A raised ranch house on Ainsley Drive that looked like every other house on…
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Prologue: The Story Behind the Words
The Story Behind the Words A Journey Through Pain, Poetry, Survival, and Purpose “Vinny, you’re never seen, but you’re always heard.” — Vincent’s sister The Red Dictionary →
Poem Archive
Browse the complete archive — 409 poems organized by theme.