In January of 2024, I was invited to a board of directors retreat at a lavish, modern resort cabin in beautiful Suncadia, Washington… but because I got there early/am a weirdo, I also made this. All that’s missing is a prodigious locked door and some allegorical flesh monsters!
Placeholder Poetry: “Beautiful Battlefield” (2012)
A light at the beginning of the tunnel.
Holed up inside during the “ice storm” blowing across Lake Erie tonight, I find myself reflecting on warmer, more floral environs back in Washington State…
Until mid-2013, my childhood home was surrounded by a huge forest of evergreens. So when an assignment arose in my first Poetry course at the University of Washington to write a poem based on a class journal entry, I ran with one I’d jotted at some point about this lush upbringing! I was taken with exploring how a forest can be both a place of solace and, in its own way, chaos. I revised it a few times, including for the internal application which eventually got me accepted to the creative writing specialization program at the UW, so I’m surprised I never shared it on here! A few new edits for readability aside, it is as it was then.
This is also a rare time where I chose to wrote in the persona of someone else. Descriptions of natural splendor aside, none of this correlates to my own life (thankfully).
–
Beautiful Battlefield
The forest marks the borderline
sprawled ’round me, west to south,
fencing in with evergreens the yellowed yard
and box of shingled bricks I’m told is home.
From here, my parents’ arguments are almost mute.
The sun surveys all, layers heat upon my back.
As I march through lashing grass,
rubber boots squeak and stick
with golden seeds, like a flag’s stars.
On the horizon, shouts and slaps fade like gunfire.
I enter, where spiders guard their dewy webs
‘cross saggy limbs and sloughing moss.
Boughs block light seeking rest
on a dark carpet, where logs rot in solitude.
No sign of broken dishes or discarded cigarettes.
Over here, a corps of scotchbroom huddle,
swapping pods, as tansies talk in plots;
over there, ferns protest paths of missions past
from which their leaves once prospered.
I head forth, through the birch;
seven shoots arc up and earthbound
— a bunker’s tunnel, taken root.
I pass the anthill army’s bustle
on a mound of silent static,
and a black ant scrambles up an oak
at eye level, AWOL.
The snail shell by the roadside,
a broken house vacated, sprayed with mud;
the devil’s clubs’ clusters
of spikes, conspiring to poison;
and the narcissus, victorious
over pinecones —
I take it all in stride, for
this war is mine
to run, holding aloft a stick
wrenched from elm.
I strip its bark, expose within
my ivory-shaded sword, and order
birds to fly and plants to part the way.
And after all, if Something finds me —
The neighbor dogs, with shambling coats and eyes;
Dad, stumbling under branches,
bourbon on the breath, in his self-inflicted aftermath
a family’s traitor —
one must always be prepared.
I know I’ll have to go
back. But for however long it takes
to trek past a beehive and risk the stings,
to kick away a molehill
and tread on something weaker saying “I was here,”
and know I’m moving over rocks and rivulets while
Mom goes nowhere in her TV chair
— I’ll stay and fight.
Back there, I’m underfoot and out of rations,
but here I walk above. I strike
fear, from the vine-throttled pines
to graves of frogs and pond scum.
There are no shoves and screams.
No slamming doors and stomping feet.
Just a chirp and scuttles, shuffles and a breeze
racing through the trees.
It’s earth’s own beautiful battlefield
and I command it all,
as much as
I surrender.
–
Poem of the Week: “Home Less”
I went back home to Washington State for Spring Break, and… it didn’t feel like it used to. I’m still not sure if that’s a good or bad thing, but I thought I should “write it out.”
Home Less
People speak of haunted houses,
but never the reverse.
We mistake it at first, home,
for the cabinets, countertops, and plastic toys.
That’s, after all, as far as our goals go,
as far as nimble legs can carry us:
to the playground,
TV room,
town bar.
Postcards, plaques, and photographs
hold fast the roof we sleep beneath—
hoarded mortar to the bricks.
All the world’s a game, and
you must be this tall to exit.
But over years,
under fees, degrees, double-digit birthday cakes,
expectations asphyxiate—comparisons oppress.
The mind moves but loops, running
not a marathon but a track:
Even if you notice a new patch of grass,
it’s still a circle.
And one day, returning turns nothing at all.
Through the front door,
and the past piles on, quarterback-like:
Memories of memories, of thoughtless acts
and thoughts never acted on.
The gravel avenue, the green, greener grass
remain unchanged,
yet the mailbox peels, the Jeep rusts,
and the dusty halls shine quieter.
Mirthful or mournful,
you can’t go back.
Every room is an interrogation room,
wrecked by recollections, recursion of diversions.
The bed’s a confessional,
coaxing midnight doubts and dreams
from uncanny comfort.
Bookshelves elevate what once mattered:
Piggy banks, cracked glasses, collector’s editions uncashed.
Half-sketches, bookmarks bisecting paperbacks,
beg questions:
When does a to-do become a once-was?
When does an ambition become an anecdote?
Branch out enough, and the limb will snap
at the base.
So it scares me, like a trust fall in transit,
that with so much behind, I don’t know where I’m headed.
Not depressed but compressed, lifted up
and weighed down at once
by the prospect of prospects.
Sure, stability is a privilege,
with a cap on laments.
Still, it’s unrelenting, this discontent
when the contents of my mind
mirror the zip code of my former universe.
A false sense of insecurity must come from somewhere.
When the beginning of your world starts feeling like its end,
the lucid dream becomes sleep paralysis—
a vacation becomes tourism through history.
There’s no cure for maturity,
but there is a placebo.
Just know
home is not a place
but a space, a radius
orbiting wherever we go—
satellites of plans, passions, and aspirations.
Home is not a building
filled with odds and ends and quiet blind spots.
It is building:
A life, a wife, a gig, something big,
or at least bigger than you were
the day before.
And until I lay those bricks—
wrap those drafts, earn that office,
let a ring follow a call for once—
there’s no place to rest.
But I’m fine being home less.
–
Notes&Sketches 