Why I like Trinity and why it annoys me

So I've just published a suite of three poems I called "Trinity", for the obvious reason that they are from the POV of Luna, Celestia and Discord respectively, and for a less obvious reason that has to do with the first one. I am pleased with the poems, but I am not pleased with the structure of the collection.

"I saw you die" was the entire reason I wrote the three. I'm pretty sure I ripped the opening line off a fanfic poem that was probably from Blake's 7 (or Star Trek, but Blake's 7 is much more likely), but I remember nothing about it except the line "I saw you die, something something end a line with I, all of the rest of the poem, I saw you die". Given those parameters I'm pretty sure the poem counts as original. :-) There is a certain scene in my head which is part of "Last Draconequus", and for reasons I am not entirely clear on, Luna, who I have written very very very little about thus far, insisted on getting the reaction scene (well, no, actually I do know some of the reasons. Luna's dreamwalking ability and quick reaction time is why she and Celestia aren't dead.) At first, I thought the poem was entirely addressing the survivor's guilt and could have been from the time period when Luna still thought Discord was dead... it wasn't until I got to almost the end that I realized how the rest of it had to go, which told me something I hadn't known before about my Luna and why she hates Discord. I am actually coming to the conclusion that her relationship with him was very, very important and powerful -- she saw him as an older brother figure, both because he was raised in the palace most of her life and because he was Celestia's boyfriend for a fairly long time -- and that what he became really hurt her, and it's because she was Element of Loyalty that she can't forgive him, even though she herself did worse later down the road. And because he isn't actually remorseful, unlike her. But the part I hadn't known is that she actually doesn't believe this is Discord. She can hate the god of chaos cleanly, because her older brother figure the chaos mage died, and obviously the god that is running around with his face and voice and name isn't him. (It actually is him, but this is what she wants to believe.) So I wonder if now that he's reformed, will they be able to reconcile?

All that being said. I loved the poem but it was only 360 words. Fimfiction requires 1000 for publication, so I was gonna have to add more poems.

I decided to do Celestia and Discord (or just Celestia if I could get it long enough, but I couldn't.) So I thought about what did I want to say about them in poetical format. Celestia is a character archetype that has always resonated with me, the manipulative mentor who loves the students she's training to fight -- cf Charles Xavier, Albus Dumbledore, Rupert Giles and many others. And one thing about these mentor figures is, they have a great capacity for detaching from their own emotions to do what they must, because otherwise how could you train a child you love to fight, and send him or her out to maybe die? And I know all about the downside of emotional detachment. The feeling of hollowness, how you can't feel anything but you fake it and you make yourself keep going for others' sake... I've been there. A lot. So that's where I went. I don't see Celestia as broken by immortality -- I think she likes immortality itself quite a bit, mostly -- but lonely immortality is hell. And the connection became obvious to me as I wrote, that while she may have imprisoned Discord and Luna, her life and her role in it are a prison she's trapped herself in, and she can't get out any more than they can. (I don't see this as being where Celestia is now, during the series; I think Twilight is the one she's dreaming of, at the end of the poem. No, I don't ship Twilestia, I think mentor/student relationships are horrible and abusive, but I think she loves Twilight as if Twilight were her own daughter.) So "Hollow" is Celestia's personal torment.

Discord was a problem. At first I thought, how the hell do you write a poem about a guy who symbolizes chaos? Poetry is all about rhyme and rhythm, order and patterns. I am ashamed to say it took me a few days to realize, duh, free verse. Many others have written about Discord's time in stone, so I was never really tempted to write a story about that, per se; "I Could Be Again" was the closest I got. But it occurred to me that the teetering on the edge of insanity (which edge is unclear) would work better with a poem than a story anyway. So "Still Life", with its total lack of a rhyme scheme and its bipolar bouncing back and forth between manic hallucinations and solipsistic despair, seemed like a good way to express what I feel it must have been like to be a statue for over a thousand years.

In terms of technical matters, the poems fit well together. I don't know if anyone noticed this, but Hollow is very, very rhythmic, with only slight deviation from patterns, to match an entity bound to the routine of the day cycle and the order of running a nation; Still Life is completely chaotic, but in two parts, where Discord seems to be most strongly yearning for an actual connection to the ponies outside his prison, it turns rhythmic and almost rhymes, like he's falling into lockstep with harmony and the pony worldview for brief tiny moments of wishing, and then slips again into either mania or despair. And "I saw you die" has a very strong but highly variable rhythm and rhyme scheme. Luna is more orderly than Discord, more chaotic than Celestia. She's also between them in terms of emotional presentation; Celestia can't feel anything, Discord is swinging back and forth between crazed forced cheerfulness and suicidal desperation, but Luna's emotions are forceful and fairly consistent.

However, the subject matter doesn't match. Yeah, yeah, I'm anal, I get all this lined up and then I get butthurt about POV and subjectivty, but Luna's the only one not talking about herself. To match Hollow and Still Life, she really ought to be talking about Nightmare Moon; or, considering that "I saw you die" came first, the Celestia and Discord poems should have been reactions. Celestia's perspective on Luna and Discord, Discord's perspective on Luna, to form an actual triangle, or else Celestia about Luna and Discord about Celestia to form a circle. But I took the easy way out. "Discord in stone" is low hanging fruit, everyone does it, and "Celestia's experience of loneliness" isn't much more original. Only, in order to fix it, first I'd have to write more poems, and they'd have to be good (I am not nearly as good a poet as I am with prose), and they'd have to be compelling, and I'd have to write enough of them that I could do two poem trilogies, and then I'd have to break Trinity up. But there are comments on Trinity now, so I don't want to break it up. (I can't just add poems. There's a reason the thing's called Trinity.)