As a runaway teen, one of my rules of thumb was to never sleep where anyone I had gotten a ride from suggested I sleep. I didn’t like the thought of strangers knowing where I would be during the night. I had no way of knowing how twisted such people might be, nor the sort of twisted company they might keep.
As I wandered the States for nearly two years, I normally slept out in the open, up high out of view of any nearby roads, or in dense woods or thickets. But sometimes it rained. I didn’t have a tent, though in retrospect I can see that it would have made sense for me to have at least toted a tarp around.
It was usually when it rained that I took my biggest risks in choosing a place to sleep. With dry weather, it was easy—just bed down away from people someplace out of view. But rain changes the situation. The human urge to stay dry is based on the fact that the body loses heat much more easily and rapidly when wet. And aside from this being unpleasant and discomforting, there’s also the very real threat of death from exposure.
Still, I generally considered the threat of being discovered as greater than the threat of freezing to death. People act on unpredictable urgings. They can leave a victim with fewer options than a little cold and wet might. So it would have to really be storming, and cold, before I’d consider passing the night in an abandoned, or empty, house. Much less a place suggested by the last person to give me a ride that day.
This poem, my 3rd hybridanelle, attempts to depict the experience of passing the night in just such a house. I didn’t sleep well that night—not so much because of the intensity of the storm as because a total stranger knew my whereabouts that night.
Stormlight
Frantic flashes illustrate my view,
Random moments shot into the light;
Thunder crushes every hope anew.
I pass the night in a frail abandoned home,
A weary vagrant teen deprived of will
Awaiting the dawn within its quaking hold.
Visions strobe throughout the empty room,
Shadows briefly singed by every bolt;
Frantic flashes illustrate my view.
I curl within my bag against the wall;
There’s nothing left for the winds to rip from me,
A weary vagrant teen deprived of will.
Etched amid the suffocating gloom,
Monster clouds roll black against the night;
Thunder crushes every hope anew.
I’ve struggled to grasp what life could ever mean
As memory and mind are stripped away;
There’s nothing left for the winds to rip from me.
Leafless limbs are drawn in sepia hues;
Stark against the darkness of my thought,
Frantic flashes illustrate my view.
I watch and listen, numb and half-aware,
My slumber but vivid streaks of fitful dream,
As memory and mind are stripped away.
Anxious waiting constantly resumes;
Shocked repeatedly from fugue to doubt,
Thunder crushes every hope anew.
I try to manage what rest I can redeem,
Protected from the storm by shifting frames,
My slumber but vivid streaks of fitful dream.
Desolation roars the whole night through;
Forces seem to tear the world apart;
Frantic flashes illustrate my view;
Thunder crushes every hope anew.
Uncertain shadows pose in countless forms;
I pass the night in a frail abandoned home,
Protected from the storm by shifting frames,
Awaiting the dawn within its quaking hold.
