“Grant me chastity and self-control — but not yet.”
There are books that tell you what a man feels, and there are books that tell you what a man believes about himself when no one is looking. Poetry Has All My Pain belongs firmly to the latter. It is not simply a record of sorrow; it is a confusion of identity. The poems move like the inner speech of someone trying to understand why his reflection feels both familiar and foreign, why his lineage tendencies seem louder than his prayers, and why the past sometimes feels like a fatal destiny.
This collection is not written from the vantage point of resolution. It stands in the place Scripture calls groaning, that mysterious spiritual region between whom a man has been shaped to become and who God has already declared him to be. It is not particularly anti-faith; it is pre-faith in tone and post-faith in longing. Reading the book through the lens of New Creation realities does not mute the pain. It contextualises it. It reveals the internal conflicts that grace resolves before a man truly rests in his adoption. They are the language of a soul mid-journey, not yet fully aware of its inheritance. And the kindness of the gospel gives us space to feel human while reminding us that our humanity is no longer the limit of who we are.
Lineage, Patterns & Inevitability?
Across several poems, the poet speaks of lineage as a living influential force. In I Swore I’ll Never Be Like My Father, he admits:
“Bloodlines do not forgive.
 They do not forget the curse of lineage.”
Many readers will recognise this feeling instinctively: the sense that you are wrestling with someone else’s wars, caught in a story that began before you were born. It feels like the cursed anger of Levi and the end of Moses before the promise land.
David confesses he was “brought forth in iniquity,” not to excuse himself but to acknowledge the weight of origin. The flaw here is that the poem suggests that lineage is a tyrant and the self is its prisoner. Yet New Creation identity reframes inheritance altogether. It insists that ancestry is no longer prophetic for the believer, that a man’s bloodline loses its determinative power the moment he becomes hidden in Christ.
Father-Wound as Theological Distortion
One of the big themes in the book is the concept of Fatherhood. In Dear Father, he writes:
“If God were a father like you,
 it would make sense why some people want nothing to do with Him.”
While this appears irreverence. It is also a diagnosis. The poet names one of the oldest spiritual wounds in human history: the projection of earthly fathers onto God. When fathers wound, abandon, or intimidate, they unconsciously become prototype images. Prayer becomes suspicion. Worship becomes fear, and the idea of divine tenderness sounds like a lie.
Throughout the poems, fatherhood appears not only as a relational wound but as a theological barrier. However, scripture emphasizes God as the Good Father, the one from whom all goodness comes.
Later, the poet admits: “They say God never fathers bastards. Then what am I?”
This is the lament before revelation, the question asked by someone who has not yet felt the witness of the Spirit overcoming the dissonance of his mind. These patterns however also reveal that the poet lives too much in head. A soulish christian, a carnal one, one not yet fully given to spiritual truths. Nonetheless, In biblical poetry, questions like this often mark the start of healing, not the end of faith. Believers should not be afraid of questions like this, those who are truly in the search of truth, often find it.
For all its grief, the book carries windows, small but persistent, where the gospel pushes through the cracks. The clearest appears in the poem “Dare I Call You Father.” After pages soaked in disappointment and distance, the poet ends with a confession that cannot be produced by trauma alone:
“Let me always dare to call you—FATHER!”
Calling God Father is not natural to someone shaped by a father who wounded him. To “dare” is to step into the adoption his emotions have not yet embraced. Even in darker pieces, The Seduction of Oblivion, Hinges, Death Doesn’t Take Me, there is a quiet acknowledgment of preservation: “Death doesn’t touch me… Maybe God wants me here.” These are instinctive recognition that Someone kept the poet alive against emotional logic.
In Burnish, he offers the vivid image:
“The sun burnished my name across the darkness,
 told it not to welcome me.”
These are lines of bewilderment. Scripture often speaks this way when describing divine preservation. He has been kept, held back from certain kinds of ruin, preserved by a mercy he cannot yet name. This reminds me of the fact that while we were sinners Christ died for us. He gave himself to be found by those who did not seek Him.
Desire for Change, and the Hesitation Before It
Perhaps the most delicate part of this work is here. The Augustine-like tone running through several poems, the desire to become someone holy, mixed with the fear of what holiness may require. It is the sense of wanting transformation while still negotiating the cost of becoming.
A man may want to step into a different story, but the emotional memory of who he has been keeps tugging at his imagination. Sometimes it is the deception of sin, other times it is ego of the self, unwilling to yield control.
The poems show the unmistaken necessity of collaboration of the human with the divine. We are called to work out our salvation with fear trembling, the old timers call it sanctification. The journey to New Creation maturity is rarely a straight line. It is a path of honest confession, small recognition, and gradual reorientation.
We see a Similar struggles in the attitude towards prayer  in Burnish, where the poet confesses:
“Maybe prayer would be luxury,
 an addictive opium,
 if only darkness wasn’t so fragile,
 crumbling away at slightest touch of light.”
What makes this line significant is its reversal of assumptions. The poet does not say darkness overwhelms him. He suggests darkness collapses too easily, too quickly, too embarrassingly for the intimidation it carries. Darkness looks massive from the inside, but the smallest movement toward God destabilises it.
Scripture consistently portrays this paradox:
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Light shines, and “the darkness has not overcome it” (John 1).
The old identity overestimates despair; the new identity underestimates communion.
Conclusion
When read beside the truth of New Creation identity, Poetry Has All My Pain becomes evidence of a heart being drawn toward adoption.
This commentary does not attempt to explain away the poems. Their ache deserves to be heard on its own terms. But it recognises that the ache is not the final voice in the poet’s life. The longing that runs through these pages is already facing the right direction
The poems describe the journey before clarity.
The gospel describes the identity waiting at the end of it.
And somewhere between those two, a man becomes new.