You're probably wondering how such anguished and artistic individuals pen such magnificently dark epics, where they got their expressive names, and how you can crank out the same self-pitying drivel, uh, create your own shadowed and unearthly opus. Read this list of handy tips for the proper creation of Darkly Gothic poems. Then choose an appropriate subject from the page of poems, and the Goth-O-MaticTM will help you express your inner angst!
Choose an appropriate gothic moniker by which you wish to be addressed. Feel free to throw a couple of appropriately dark and wicked words together to form something mysterious with which to impress your nonpoetic friends. Adding a color to a predatory bird is still reasonably popular, as is naming yourself after one or two of the notable entities in Hell.
Concepts such as darkness, loss, pain, grief, madness, death, night, and the bloodthirsty undead make good topics for Darkly Gothic poems. You cannot create a Darkly Gothic emotional abyss about how hard your Spanish class is, or how Mom gives you grief for wearing black eye liner, or that stupid Autocorrect.
If you don't know Poe...
Go ahead and let that emotional turmoil draw you into depression. It makes you create better. You can always pull out of it, right? You don't want to commit suicide, but you want to convey that nothing matters. Oh, and don't be that person that goes to schools and starts gunning down innocents; those people have bad coping mechanisms or weird revenge complexes, and they never write good poetry.
Enough said.
Don't worry about how short the lines of your darkly gothic poem are. Feel free to devote every line to a scant few words or even a single word. Remember, solitude makes something stand out by itself, um, well, by definition. Consider the following:
'Falling ever darkly into
the ebon abyss of feral eyes,
screaming against
the groping fingers of your
black obsessive passion:
torment.'
... Wow! Did you feel that torment at the end? We know we did. Hey, entire outpourings of tormented souls have been contained within a couple of fingerspans on the left. The best poems will make you scroll down after only twenty words or so.
Grab that thesaurus and rape it. The more methods you have of saying the same word over again will mightily improve your wordsmithing. Using little-known words like 'eidolon,' 'inexorable,' 'vitae' or 'etiolated' will give you a depth which not-so-darkly gothic poets will envy.
Go off about that personal angst. Rant in a depressingly deep way about the heartless one who left you alone and barren because you were too depressingly deep. Describe the vision of the ethereal path you have chosen; make sure there's dark fog wisping through it. Display your broken and tattered soul for all to see.
Occasionally stopping and reaching your arms out in the stigmata position helps stretch those creative muscles. Take minor everyday objects (a clock) and make them looming and malicious (a stark, cruel reminder of inevitable mortality, blank and accusing, every second drawing inexorably closer to oblivion).
If you're building a poetry site, or any goth site for that matter, it is imperative that you include any picture of an angel statue or gravemarker you can find. Those weeping Mary ones, or angels with heads bowed, make your poetry that much more painful to read. Ah, I mean convey your pain all the more. If you can combine it with images of dead roses and a few half-melted candles, so much the better.
Of course, one can't always be at one's utmost ghoulish. Sometimes, even the undead can get that pesky writer's (or occasional arterial) block. Be creative! Go to a local cemetery and read the tombstones. Find a large flat one and lie down upon it, reveling in your closeness to the dead. Lock yourself in a darkened room and read H.P. Lovecraft stories to yourself until you sob with horror. The brave even move toward ancient Celtic, or even Runic manuscripts for that special surge of dark energy. Feel free to go to European cathedrals and sit through those Latin choir hymnals with the recorder on. Practice saying everything in Vincent Price's voice.
For a special esoteric flavour that leaves the reader aching, er, moved to their centre, go ahead and spell using the Queen's English. Leaf through that great medieval literature, the ever-popular Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Use names like Ethelred, Morgoth and Vincegatorix for darkly powerful supernatural entities. Check out a medieval book from the library and write a poem about the torment of translating Middle English while blinking from the blood dripping into your eyes. Let your imbalanced humours bleakly shine!
Every Darkly Gothic Poem need not be written about distant fogs rolling through twilight graveyards (but boy, do those poems taste good). Let the sun bring to light your horrible guilt, your significant other's hypocrisy, and your self-absorbed pity, I mean, your hidden meekness. Let that eye-searing daystar expose your naked insignificance, burning you to your angst-ridden soul.
Wait... no, forget that, I'm sorry. Don't have fun with it. This isn't about fun.