[Originally published in the out-of-print “lost” debut issue of Desperation Fanzine, Summer 2020.]

I landed back in Akron by default. London to Toronto to New York by plane, New York to Cleveland by bus, Cleveland to Akron by Dad, final approach to 25 as I dropped my pack to the ground in the bedroom of my youth. My head hit the pillow and I didn’t come to for a week.

I emerged one bright afternoon to the labored gasps of a fading Midwestern summer, an unmerciful humid murk with a wisp of autumnal death in the wind. And I found myself suddenly motionless. Fourteenth Street and its attendant luxuries were reliable and comforting crutches, but my boyhood home was no place for an extended comedown from three months out of the country. Not with my parents watching.

So I called Andrew. He had landed back in Akron a week after me and was crashing with an aunt and uncle, also by default. Not the audience he wanted either. The people we knew in the place we grew up were just happy to see us, and we couldn’t handle it. This situation, it was far from dire, but it was strange. Strange after Amsterdam and that island in the North Sea. Strange after the month in Paris. Strange after a summer of purposeless motion soaked deeply with intent. We did not deserve the free room and board and good graces of our families. Most 24-year-olds don’t.

So a second call, to my brother in Boise. A light-bulb impulse. A quick explanation and a hasty negotiation. Then another call to Andrew. A few days later we dropped our packs to the ground in my brother’s vacant North Hill bungalow, one bridge removed from the street lamps of our youth. A weird spot, nebulous terms for all, but problem solved. I was grateful for the space – close enough still to who I once was, far enough away to be who I had become.

We settled in and the Midwestern fall settled in around us. Andrew had a thesis due, I had nothing to do — other than figure out what to do, and on the job front, there was nothing doing. But there was music, a Scrabble board and a perpetual jug of burgundy wine. Cigarettes and angled columns of autumn sun on the front porch. We toasted our travels, we talked women, we contemplated the anxious freedom of the present with little concern for the insistent future. I found myself in lockstep with the season, and the poetry of the moment was not lost on me. So I set about writing it down, verse by golden verse.

Good poetry is a rare mineral. It can take a lifetime to chisel away at the slab of one’s experience and uncover an ounce of it, but crap poetry is available by the pound under every crooked step along the brick-lined street. And soon the poet laureate of 1138 Collinwood Avenue was producing a shit-ton of it.

But that didn’t stop me. I wrote, edited and scrutinized, over and over, until I filled a cheap folder full of finished verse. Over cigarettes and empty stomachs I shared this work with Andrew and it was duly celebrated, confirmation bias be damned. Full of false confidence, I then set about becoming a published poet.

Envelope after audacious envelope I mailed out, imagining the acclaim of the bearded and corduroyed at universities and publishing houses near and far. But it never came. All I received in return was rote rejection by SASE. The closest thing resembling praise after months of pissed-away postage: “Some interesting things, but not so much.”

Failure is often poetic, but not this. This was downright pathetic. The reality stared at me from the bookshelf: Dickinson, Rilke, Cummings. Not some dickhead from Akron. The young and dumb, they don’t always know their place, but I was starting to figure out where I was and perhaps where I’d always be. So I decided to stare down my failure, force myself to make eye contact, put it somewhere it couldn’t be ignored. With hammer and nails, I pounded every rejection letter into the plaster until I had filled an entire bedroom wall. When the last letter was hung, I found a pencil and scribbled above my shrine to failure, quotation marks and all, “The Wall of Rejection.”

A year or so prior, a friend and fellow writer had recounted finding an unmarked box of her father’s poems and their accompanying rejection letters, and her discovery had filled her with that aching biological sadness we feel for our parents when we realize that they too are human, prone to failure and haunted by the ghosts of abandoned dreams. And I wasn’t going to put someone through that with this. This failure, it was mine to own, to occupy cheap space on a wall in the present, not the burden of some future daughter rummaging through the attic for evidence of what slowly killed her father.

Most aspiring writers stop writing at some point. They lose inspiration, stop fighting time, forfeit to the exhaustion of perpetual rejection. I haven’t stopped and I can’t imagine I ever will, but when “The Wall of Rejection” came down right before I moved out that spring, I effectively turned my back on poetry. Sure, I’ve written a poem here and there over the last two decades, but nothing to fuss about, nothing to send out into the world for disapproval, nothing worthy of space in an unmarked box. I’ve shared a few with my wife and she likes them, but of course she does. That’s what good wives do — they tell you they like them.

Shortly after moving out and moving on, back to New Hampshire to be with my future wife, I got a call from my parents: “What’s ‘The Wall of Rejection?’” The rejection letters were gone, but the pencil marks remained. I had tried to erase the evidence while packing, but I quickly realized my brilliant plan to write on the wall with pencil wasn’t so brilliant, and in typical 24-year-old fashion I left it for someone else to deal with, and that someone else happened to be my brother’s de facto property managers. Their question was asked in the same “I don’t understand the joke/reference” tone I had grown accustomed to hearing since my teenage years, and those sorts of questions had the effect of comprehensively disarming me and rendering me, with back against the wall, verbally inept. This situation, it was no exception.

I can only imagine what was going through their minds: “We put him through college for this?” My parents worked their asses off for our family, and they are thoughtful, reflective people, but for better or worse they are also sensible, pragmatic Midwesterners, and I couldn’t see them wrapping their heads around “successful poet” as a life goal/worthy pursuit without wondering where the hell they went wrong with me. So much for my parents not watching.

But you know what? They never gave me shit about it. Even as my father patched up the nail holes and repainted the wall while I was 750 miles away squatting with my future in-laws. That’s what good parents do. They don’t give you shit about it. It’s tough stuff loving someone that much. Now that I’m a father, I know what that’s like.

Too often failure gets shoved in a desk drawer or buried in the attic, never to be reconciled. We’re quick to applaud ourselves for our supposed authenticity, but how disingenuous we act toward our failures – if we choose to acknowledge them at all. The empowerment people will tell you a wall is something to tear down, to break through, to climb, especially when that wall is failure. I’m not one of them. I may have a yoga practice, but that doesn’t mean I spend my free time scrolling through Instagram for self-help tropes that I can tap to purchase as a sustainable T-shirt. But I have spent my free time staring at walls, and empowering myself in the process, and staring at my unpoetic poetic failures of 2002-2003, I realized I didn’t need poetry and poetry didn’t need me. What I needed was to get back to storytelling, where I can still string together words that sing without constraining myself to stanzas that only strangle me. Walk a path with failure long enough, and at some point it leads you in the right direction. And staring at a wall of it led me back to the path I should have been walking all along.

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