A lot of people ask me where the name came from. So I shall devote one post to explaining what "dezphaire" is and how it came to be. Well, it all started during a sophomore theology class in college. There I was, bored out of my wits, doodling on my ring-bound poetry notebook. It became a habit for me to list down words that caught my ear, words that I thought had great promise to stir others' souls in a poem. In the middle of the lecture, I heard the word abandon. That sounded nice. I wrote it down.

I whipped out my electronic thesaurus. The word abandon led to surrender then to loss then to desolation and then despair. Despair. Defined as the absence of all hope. Ahhh how sad, how simple yet poetic... how soul-stirring.

Despair. Despair. I became drawn to the word. Let's put more spice into it, I thought. Dez^pair. How about like Liz Phair. How about Dezphaire? That was it. It was like the air grew thick around me. And I was filled by it in this one grand finding of self.

And the dark, soulful writer in me had a name. And my poetry had an identity that is my own.

To be amongst my composed words, click here.