This article contains minor spoilers for the game Night In The Woods. None for the main plot.
I’ve shared some of my poetry in the Forum before. I’ve been writing it since I was about 12 years old, after I needed to write something for a Dutch assignment and my teacher was really impressed with me. I guess I’m a people pleaser like that…
I love writing poetry, since it allows me to turn my terrible feelings into something lovely. Something I can even be proud of. I don’t share all of it, since even I, who put my entire grief process in the Forum, maintain some boundaries, but I love reading it back and seeing what bothered me at a certain time in my life. The words I would put to my loneliness when I was 13, the metaphors that captured my fear living alone for the first time, things like that.
Despite having written poetry for very long, I’ve never been great at reading it. I’ve gotten poetry books from proud grandparents before, but usually I just can’t get through them. It doesn’t help that a lot is about romantic love, which doesn’t interest me that much.
This meant that for a very long time, my favorite poem was, well, my moms favorite poem. This is something of a character defect I can’t seem to shake, that when in doubt I copy either my mom or my sister. This has gotten me into trouble before, but let’s not get into that here.
To be fair, my moms favorite poem is quite lovely. It’s called Voor Ari by Jules Deelder. It’s about his daughter who has just been born, and how she shouldn’t worry, because the world keeps spinning, whatever happens.
The problem is that this poem suits my mom, not me. For one, it’s about parenthood, and secondly, it’s by a guy who got called ‘Rotterdam’s night mayor’, because of his eccentric style and prevalence in the nightlife. Not really someone I identify with.
Once I realised this, I set about finding my own favorite poem, which is deceptively hard. It’s hard to find a favorite, instead of realising a favorite. I’ve never actively chosen my favorite song, or favorite color. I’ve just realised that they are. In the end, it mainly boiled down to keeping my ears open for something that resonated with me.
When I was 19, something did. I started playing a game called Night In The Woods. It’s a beautiful game, and I recommend it to everyone. It’s about a girl (who is a cat in the game, don’t question it) moving back home from college to her parents’ place in a town called Possum Springs, and you slowly find out why, as well as some other mysteries happening in the background.
One of the main themes in the game is how the town is slowly falling apart because it used to be a mining town, but now all the jobs are gone. Everyone is sort of scrambling to keep their life together, or deciding to build a new one somewhere else. In general, it’s very much about trying to return to a past that isn’t there anymore. Which is also reflected by Mae, the main character, realising that all her friends have kind of moved on from her.
What I really love about the game is the dialogue. I love games that are mainly about talking to NPCs (if you know any good ones hmu). This reflects how I am in real life as well, a true yapper at heart. I’m just always so charmed by conversations and stories that happen in the margins of art. Night In The Woods really scratches that itch for me.
One of my favorite characters is Selmers. A woman a few years older than Mae, who got told to journal by her therapist, but preferred poetry. Every day you can come up to her and she has these little funny poems for you, that are always very short but sweet. If you talk to her enough, you can unlock a cutscene where she’s at a poetry group in the library, and she reads a longer poem. This is, as you might have guessed, my favorite one.
I’ll not write too much on it, other than the fact that if Voor Ari felt like my mom, this feels like me. I hope you like it, it reads as follows:
There’s No Reception in Possum Springs
No reception here
I wave my black phone
In the air like a flare
like a prayer
but no reception
I read on the Internet
baby face boy billionaire
Phone app sold
made more money in one day
than my family over 100 generations
More than my whole world ever has
World where house-buying jobs
became rent-paying jobs
became living with family jobs
Boy billionaires
Money is access
access to politicians
waiting for us to die
lead in our water
alcohol and painkillers
Replace my job with an app
replace my dreams of a house and a yard
With a couch in the basement
“The future is yours!”
Forced 24-7 entrepreneurs.
I just want a paycheck and my own life
I’m on the couch in the basement
they’re in the house and the yard
Some night I will catch a bus out to the west coast
And burn their silicon city
to the ground