Bad Poem

Bad Poem started with an afternoon of rereading my old sketchbooks — the ones full of half-finished drawings, photoshoot concepts, and the kind of poetry I only wrote when I didn’t know anyone would ever read it. I’d forgotten how unfiltered I used to be. Every page was too much — too sincere, too dramatic, too everything — and yet, buried in the excess, there was something true.

I wouldn’t call the poems bad… just honest. They reach for something I still chase in my work now — that impossible moment when feeling turns into form. Still, it’s always uncomfortable to meet your past self. There’s a kind of tenderness and resistance there: the artist who wanted to be seen, and the one who still doesn’t.

That’s what Bad Poem became about for me — the tension between expression and exposure. I built it as a scent that feels intimate but contained, like opening a drawer you haven’t touched in years. Lavender and patchouli for calm and memory, soft florals for the ache of trying to say too much, and a quiet base of amber and smoke to hold it all down. It’s not about nostalgia exactly, but about witnessing yourself through time.

I think about this often — how making art, or even posting online, requires a kind of vulnerability that never gets easier. The self can’t really fit into a short caption, a product, or a single candle. But creating still asks us to try. That’s the paradox I live in: wanting to express something deeply personal, but also wanting to hide from it once it exists.

Pouring Bad Poem in my Vancouver studio, I felt that old nervousness again — like pressing “publish” on something you’re not sure belongs in the world. But that tension is the point. Each pour, each flicker, each word we almost don’t want to share is proof that we’re still reaching.

Bad Poem isn’t about embarrassment anymore. It’s about permission — to look back, to make something honest, and to keep trying to contain what can’t really be contained.

Matty