Beatin' Paths

As I’ve been building my life as a writer, I’ve started to think more and more about publishing. When I first started hitchhiking, and then living in my converted school bus, I didn’t think much about publishing real books with a serious publisher. I was focused on improving my craft as a writer, while reading and adventuring to gain the experience that would make my writing worth reading. But now, I have a pretty good vision of certain books that I know I’d like to write and publish before I die.

Four quality posts a month— that’s what I promise you here at Beatin’ Paths. So, after a big essay a few days ago, and a lovely new poem yesterday, here I am again in your inbox. Hi! I’m at my sixth Burning Man. This year, I was blessed with an Artist Ticket; I’m here to add my poetry to the most creative city on Earth. You might enjoy reading five poems I wrote last year, at Burning Man 2025. But I have a different poem here for you today that I’ve never posted before.

I’m posting this from Gerlach, Nevada, just before I go onto the Black Rock Desert playa to wait in line for Burning Man.

For as long as there’s been a “left,” the left has been divided. After all, to share a belief in change or progress does not imply agreement on any specific form of change, or on how to get there. Conserving the past is, inherently, a more unitary project; altering the future involves contested decisions between divergent paths. Much ink and blood has been spilled among those who agree that the future ought to be better than the present, but disagree on how.

In July, I hitchhiked around Ireland for 11 days. I spent most of my time on the northwest coast, with a few days in Dublin at the beginning and end. “Great South Wall” is a notebook poem from the Great South Wall that sticks way out into Dublin Bay. “sliabh mór” is a phone note poem from my first joyous day romping around in nature on Achill Island along the side of Sliabh Mór, the “big mountain,” where sheep and I roamed free, and the sky didn’t get dark til 11.

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published i truly am worth love, as simply as the sight of nature’s sky in sunshine is worthy of blue light i will not choose to suffer beyond a healthy height, but burn in starry balance to share my farthest bright i let the world reveal me in all my hidden night, forgive myself my many sins and hitch my soul to right I wrote this poem atop Croagh Patrick, the most holy mountain in Ireland, where Saint Patrick fasted for 40 days.

It is true that suffering, in a wide sense of the word, is a source of growth. We must experience the world, life, bear new weights to gain new strengths. There are healthy kinds of suffering. But for some people, suffering can become an unhealthy habit— an addiction. This can happen to anyone, so I’m here to warn you. It often happens to those who, at some point early on, had no choice— suffering was given to them.

For the last decade, my life has been hitched to a singular dream— absorbing America as deeply as possible, in order to become a representative American writer and contribute my unique verse to our unfinished story. If you want to understand who I am and the work I’m doing, you might like reading The Great American Novel Project, Explained. I spent my five years as a temporary Harvard dropout exploring all 50 states across the U.S., learning the contours of the country.

I like to take backroads. At this point, I’ve driven across the country so many times that I’ve made ruts through all the interstates; so, I have to turn off my GPS, and beat my own improvisational path through the map— the Algorithm and Efficiency be damned. Thus I found myself last week weaving a new way through southern Tennessee, and then Mississippi’s Natchez Trace Parkway (along the living path indigenous people once walked.) Here are two very different poems from the wide & wet South.

Wrote this poem the other day at the peak of Fuji Mountain in Oregon, surrounded by 360-degree vistas of the Oregon Cascades. It felt good to write a place-based poem again in my old notebook. For the last few months, most of my poetry has been people-based while busking spontaneous typewriter street poetry. But this poem is more representative of how I became a poet— sitting in nature, channeling the poetry already present in the silence.