Who are the biggest influences in your life?
Influence isn’t just who inspires you when things are going well.
It’s who shaped your voice, your spine, your boundaries, and your refusal to shrink.
Some influences teach you how to speak.
Some teach you how to survive.
Some teach you exactly what paths you will never follow.
This is a living map.
Creative Influences, Where the Art Found Me First
Before I ever understood craft or branding or audience, I understood feeling.
These artists didn’t just make music. They made permission.
Hobo Johnson, Poetry Wearing a Hoodie
Hobo Johnson’s work feels like overhearing someone tell the truth in a grocery store aisle.
His lyrics read like spoken word wrapped in everyday chaos, anxiety, longing, humor, and self awareness.
He takes ordinary moments and pulls the emotional thread until it hums.
That taught me something crucial, you don’t need spectacle to be powerful.
You need honesty and timing.
That influence shows up in my work when I write about small moments that carry heavy weight, the quiet details that hit harder than a scream.
NF, Naming the Darkness Without Letting It Win
NF’s influence is about how to talk about pain.
He never glamorizes struggle, he dissects it.
Mental health isn’t aesthetic in his music, it’s work, confrontation, accountability, growth.
He shows that vulnerability and strength can occupy the same body.
That mattered to me.
Especially in spaces where pain is often exploited instead of processed.
Snailmate, Experimentation as Survival
Snailmate taught me that you don’t have to choose between chaos and intention.
Their sound is loud, fast, sharp, playful, and deeply self aware.
Genre lines collapse. Identity is fluid. Lyrics cut and dance at the same time.
That influence lives in my refusal to make my work palatable for comfort.
Art is allowed to be strange.
It’s allowed to be fun.
It’s allowed to be unclassifiable.
Mayday Parade, Raw Emotion Without Apology
Mayday Parade doesn’t flinch from emotional exposure. Mayday parade is an emotion.
Heartbreak, longing, grief, regret, hope, all of it laid bare without irony.
That sincerity taught me that earnestness isn’t weakness.
Sometimes the bravest thing is to say, this hurt me, and I’m still here.
Moral Integrity, Learned Early and Reinforced Daily
Some of the deepest influences aren’t artists.
They’re examples.
My Mom, Teaching Me Who Deserves Respect
My mom taught me integrity by living it.
She didn’t make speeches. She modeled it.
She worked in the IDD community and brought me with her.
I learned early that difference is not deficiency.
She had a lesbian best friend when that still made people uncomfortable in the early 70s and through her entire life.
She defended people others dismissed.
She showed up for the underdog because someone always needs to.
That shaped how I see people, how I refuse hierarchy based on identity, and why I don’t negotiate on dignity.
The Elders Who Helped Me Become Myself
When I came out, it wasn’t a clean or singular moment.
It was a series of brave, terrifying steps.
Queer elders stepped in where systems didn’t.
They helped me cut my hair when I was shedding an old version of myself and stepping into my next identity: Lesbianism.
They helped me rebuild a wardrobe that felt like home in my skin masculine clothes and hair way back then. When I didn’t understand I could become a man, and I thought that was the only option. So I made it fit.
The next group of elders taught me about binders, safety, autonomy, and peer groups.
They connected me to doctors, surgeons, information, and access when I moved to Vegas and after.
They didn’t just help me transition.
They helped me survive transition.
They showed me what chosen family looks like when it’s rooted in care. They taught me that the people from before who didn’t accept me now never were really my friends.
Comment and share what influenced your creativity, your morals, or who not to be?
Do you have influences elsewhere in your life you’d like to mention? Those are fine too. We appreciate your input and conversation.
The Influences I Learned From by Rejection
Not all influence pulls you forward.
Some pushes you away from becoming something you refuse to be.
My Father, Absence as a Lesson
My dad had enough to give more and chose not to.
That absence was instructive.
Not in bitterness, but in clarity.
It taught me that providing isn’t just financial.
It’s presence, responsibility, and showing up when it’s inconvenient.
I learned what abandonment looks like.
And I learned that I will never replicate it.
Political Power That Chooses Harm
Watching the Republican political party in power push policies that strip rights from immigrants, migrants, people of color, disabled people, LGBTQ people, and start wars for wages. Then they ignore or enabling actual predators which is not abstract.
It’s personal.
It’s dangerous.
That contradiction taught me vigilance.
It taught me to question authority, to read policy, to listen to who is harmed and who is protected.
It shaped my refusal to separate politics from lived reality.
Because people live inside laws.
Influence doesn’t end with what shaped us.
It continues with what we pass on.
I carry poetry, music, elders, integrity, and hard lessons into my work because someone else might need that map.
Someone else might be standing where I once stood, looking for permission, language, or a way through.
We don’t get to choose all our influences.
But we do choose what we become because of them.
If this piece made you think of:
A queer kid who needs proof they won’t be alone, An artist struggling to trust their voice, Someone unpacking family, faith, or politics with honesty, or Anyone learning how to build themselves from what they were given.
Share this with them to remind them they’re allowed to exist fully, loudly, and with intention.
Where you will find real people, unfiltered language, and rough-edged art. Submit to the next Poeaxtry Prism quarterly by form or email Poeaxtryspoetryprism@gmail.com
