Two roads diverged in a yellow wood…the famous first line from Robert Frost’s poem, “The Road Not Taken.” I first read the poem when I was quite young. I didn’t really understand it, but I liked that it rhymed. It might possibly be the poem that made me want to try poetry myself.

          My life so far has been spent as a software engineer and not a poet. It was a choice I made after finishing my undergrad for the simple reason I didn’t want to be poor anymore. In hindsight, I guess my plan worked.

          I’m a software engineer who has been to Paris so many times. Paris in the rain, Paris at Christmas, Paris for coffee and eggs at St. Regis Cafe, for oeufs mayonnaise, burgers, oysters on the Île Saint-Louis, drinking in Paris—wine by the glass, the bottle, the bucket. Paris for shopping, for cigarettes, for cathedrals, for tourism. I’ve been an American tourist in Paris who can’t speak a word of French, but tries to speak the words I know at every cafe I go to get coffee, where every server, bartender, and cafe owner just smiles at me each time and replies in English. 

         And Paris is lovely for all those things. There’s no city quite like it. But I didn’t really get Paris. The thing about being a software engineer and not a poet for twenty years is that I didn’t grow up wanting to be a software engineer. I wanted to be a poet. And no matter how many times I told myself that I’m not a poet anymore—that I don’t write anything worth reading beyond code meant for computers—I believe, now, that maybe the simple truth of the matter is that I’ve been lying to myself for decades. 

        Everything changed when, in December of 2023, I wrote poetry in Paris.

       In August of 2022, I couldn’t walk or stand for more than 45 seconds. I had a herniated disc in my back. The surgery was simple enough, my recovery excellent, but the whole experience changed me. The things that were truly important came into sharp focus. Climbing the corporate ladder? That wasn’t important anymore.

       My wife and I had always talked about traveling the world for a year. Seventeen years into our marriage, we found ourselves in our 40s facing the real possibility that we might not ever fulfill this dream, that nothing is guaranteed, especially our health. We finally decided to stop talking about it and go.

       My wife had plans for how to use this time and I didn’t. The only thing I really understood was that I just didn’t want to think about writing software code for a while. But what to do with the time? I could write, but I hadn’t written a poem I considered decent in twenty years. But wasn’t this my dream in college? Traveling the world, seeing things, experiencing places and people I never knew existed and writing poetry?

       I grew up in the Missouri Ozarks. Both sides of my family have their roots in a small town called Ava. It’s about an hour from West Plains, Missouri—home of Dan Woodrell and Winter’s Bone. I may be the first person on my father’s side to have a college education, but that wasn’t even my idea. It was Howard, my manager at the gas station I worked at when I was 19, who forced me to quit and go to Missouri State. 

       I studied both computer programming and poetry. I met the poet Marcus Cafagña there, the late Dr. Jane Hoogestraat, and the late Michael Burns. And famous poets would visit class—Sharon Olds, Mark Jarman, Eavan Boland, and others. Undergrad classmates went on to get their MFAs and I went into the tech industry.

       It’s not the choice I would have made if I had been less of a coward. I simply didn’t want to live a poverty-stricken life and I viewed a career in tech as the pathway to a more comfortable one with copious opportunities for travel. If I could have made $22 per word, the equivalent of what Hemingway made by writing for Collier’s in 1944, I would have given it a shot. The tech industry came close.

       Before my wife and I left to travel the world, I decided to go home—home to see family and friends, but also to write poetry. In between Ava and West Plains, but to the south, is Gainsville, Missouri, the childhood home of Lee Busby and Brandon Funk, former classmates and poets who had been running a writer’s retreat out of Dawt Mill on North Fork River, called River Pretty.

       Lee had been trying to get me to come out for a decade, so I put a trip together and went out to the retreat. I had a workshop with Marcus for the first time since my undergrad. Drank whiskey and beer with former college classmates. I wrote new poems and I felt like they were good.

       It’s hard for me to articulate what a “good” poem is versus a “bad” one, but the definition I carry inside my head and heart when I read a poem is immediate and instinctual. Maybe it’s the first line or the turn in the latter part of the poem. Ending lines really hit home with me. I can’t always articulate it, but that something has to be there, especially in my own work, and if I don’t have it, the poem becomes “a nothing poem”, in the words of my late poetry professor, Michael Burns.

       I was writing poems that were something. It felt like a new start, but also like a homecoming. Like I had somehow remembered who I was supposed to be.

       I started writing in May 2023 and couldn’t stop. I wrote poems in Valladolid and Bacalar Mexico. Poems in Caye Caulker, Belize. Poems in Antigua, Guatemala, in Costa Rica, in Colombia, in the Atacama Desert, in Santiago, in Mendoza. I wrote twenty poems in Buenos Aires, then poems in Spain and France—Reims, Rennes, Vannes, Bordeaux, Tours, and finally, in December 2023, I found myself in Paris.

       I sometimes have access to an apartment on the Île Saint-Louis in Paris, a building, which I discovered this year, has a lot of history for writers and poets. The Three Mountains Press was located there, a small press in the 1920s run by Bill Bird. Ezra Pound was an editor at some point in its small tenure and the press shared office space with Ford Madox Ford. Even Ernest Hemingway, I believe, did a stint as a guest editor for an issue. The myth is that he would walk across the street to read and edit pages on the Seine.

       I had been to this apartment multiple times, but didn’t realize its history. When I wrote my first poem in that building, something about my relationship with Paris changed. It was no longer cynical or dismissive. I was a poet in Paris and everything Paris means to both writers who are living and what it meant to the writers no longer with us—all those indescribable emotions now lived in my heart. And it was no time at all before I found myself walking the streets alone in the cold and rain, smoking a cigarette and reading poetry, contemplating art, madly fascinated with the idea of getting my own apartment in Paris and starting my own artist’s cafe, to rip myself out of capitalism and corporate ladders and reduce my needs in this world to coffee, a duck rillette, and a baguette.

       And then you wake up.

      For me, that moment came on the beaches of Sri Lanka, a few weeks later. I was watching families and children on the beach. The beach wasn’t privatized and commercialized like beaches we have in California, but I was still an American tourist sitting with other tourists from around the world. The beach was beautiful, but it wasn’t Paris. The spell of Paris was wearing off, but it was my 45th birthday, and I was writing my 68th poem since the start of the trip—a birthday poem. A poem about Columbo if he were a detective in Colombo. A moment surreal in the sense that it was the first time I didn’t feel like I was pretending to be a poet anymore or that I needed Paris to maintain some kind of illusion of being a poet. I was a poet, writing in Tangalle Beach, of all places. It was a hopeful moment, a moment where I believed that I didn't have to go back to just being a software engineer, that I could go home and still continue my practice of writing poetry.

       It had never felt that simple before. I always believed I needed to be one or the other in order to be successful: a software engineer or a poet, but not both.

        Most people don’t get the opportunity to travel the world and do little else but write. I’m extremely privileged and lucky to have done so. But I think the more important thing for me is the realization that deep in my heart, I’ve always been a poet, albeit a non-practicing one. It would explain a lot of conflicts I’ve had with other software engineers and leadership over the lack of ethics in technical decision making. But it took a year of self-realization to figure that out, a year completely separated from tech to understand. Capitalism has a way of stripping out pieces of your humanity in the name of “stakeholder value”. 

         Capitalism also has a way of reeling you back in. 

        I’m home now, back in Santa Barbara, my magical trip around the world now over. I have a house to keep up and bills to pay and we need health insurance again, so it’s time to re-enter the tech industry. Maybe you’re curious about my poetry practice—if I’ve kept writing since coming home, if I’m writing as frequently, or if things have changed? The answers are yes, no, and yes.

        Yes, I’ve kept writing since coming home, but I’m only writing about a poem a week now, instead of two. I think this is a pace I can keep up for now. One day, I’d like to switch my habits to writing a little every day, but I need to build the routine for it first.

        No, I’m not writing as frequently, but that comes with caveats. My goals have changed. I’m focused on writing pieces I like and abandoning the poem more quickly if it’s not working out. I have a new writing tracker for 2024-2025. I like to have my “fiscal writing year” starting in a month other than January, to take the pressure off from holidays. The same logic applies to my “fiscal writing week”, which goes from Wednesday to Wednesday. I do that so I don’t feel a huge pressure to write my poem on a weekend when I have other things going on.

       This leads me to answering the last question: yes, things have changed, but I think for the better—like the change in my reading habits. Before I left for my trip, I would consistently buy poetry collections and never read them. I have shelves full of beautiful poetry books, a lot of them signed by poets no longer with us. When I came home and put them all back, I realized just how long each of these collections have been waiting to be read. I read something online once, that books are like bottles of wine, and if you take care of them, it really doesn’t matter how long the book needs to wait. They’ll wait long enough for you to be ready to enjoy them.

       The thing about making a choice between two roads is that they might end up going to the same place. There are an infinite number of ways through a yellow wood. One path might be harder or have less sunlight, other paths might be easier. And while sometimes you have a choice about which path to take, often you don’t. I don’t know why my life has been easier or harder than another person’s life. I don’t know why I had to be a software engineer, or why it took this trip around the world to bring me back to poetry. All I know is that I’m here now, having been given a gift, where I need to choose again which path to take. Do I index on software engineering because it’s what I know, or do I follow poetry where it takes me? I guess only time will tell.