Ravings

BONUS : Explanation/Interpretation

I hate doing this. I feel like I'm spoiling everything. Poems shouldn't even be interpreted if you ask me. Everyone should be free to give poems the meaning they want. But I also feel like explaining a few things could actually be beneficial to some people, so here we go! (+ this "Bonus" is not included in the paperback version of Ravings.)

I. Anemia

As I was telling you in the Introduction, I have been afflicted with anemia for quite some time now, and it's a tremendously difficult disease to deal with. I started showing signs of it when I was 16.

It decreases the amount of oxygen that passes into blood vessels and creates lots of issues into your system.

As it manifests, your extremities (hands and feet) get cold and you start feeling extremely weak, your hair and nails get brittle and you have a hard time concentrating and getting things done. Since you feel weak and can't get much things done, you ultimately start losing faith in yourself and doubting your abilities.

But it also humbles you in a way. That's what line 12 is about. You tend to feel invincible when you're completely healthy, you feel like it all always happens to "others" and you end up forgetting that any disease could start growing in you, any day, and perhaps without you even noticing.

Going through all these things has been quite hurtful to me. I eventually started feeling like this disease was becoming inextricably tied to my very self and that there was no getting out of this vicious circle, and that it was written; anemia was my Nemesis, the thing that was inescapably going to cause my downfall in every sense of the word.

II. Sunk

It's just about some point in my life, at which I was doing really bad mentally and my Mom would always say I was doing just fine to anyone who would ask. I know she meant to protect me, but I didn't want to pretend to be happy when I wasn't.

III. Eros

I wrote this poem after coming back from a party, being completely drunk and I called it Eros because I once heard that Greeks, during Antiquity didn't use only one word to describe "love", as most of current languages do, but three.

- Agapē which described a kind of love that's close to the Christian concept of "charity"; the love we owe to each and every being.

- Eros which is tantamount to young love in all its passion, foolishness and spontaneousness.  

- Philia which alludes to a love that springs from Eros, and then evolves into some sort of intense friendship mixed with devotion and faithfulness.

It's about a person with whom I had a strong, weird and quite amazing relationship and connection with.

At the time, it was kind of a gift to him saying "Hey, I know I'm not the most expressive person, and since I never had the balls to actually come up to you and tell you I want "it" as much as you do, here's this thing I wrote thinking about us."

It was a rather intense relationship, as lines 4 and 5 show. And I wanted him to know that I was more than ready to suffer because I knew that our relationship wasn't going to be easy. He had his temper and I had mine but at the same time, I felt like we were the exact same people with the exact same way of thinking.

Line 9 emphasizes the fact that I had never actually met anyone like him before.

He was a really bright person and that's the first thing that struck me about him. I felt like an idiot when I talked with him, but not in a negative way, he was far from being arrogant. It was more in a way that made me want to spend more time with him in hopes of, sometime, seeing his intelligence rub off on me.