Hey all- I know many of us here are creative, artistic individuals, and I thought there should be a thread for sharing NIN-inspired writing. I, for one, think of Trent and his music as a primary inspiration behind my most creative inclinations... I'm sure many of you feel the same way.

I have been doing a "poem a day" challenge to help me get over some emotional trauma. Still in the early phases, and I'm not typically a poet, but it's been fun to scrap together random ideas. Today, I found myself writing about Trent. I felt like sharing, and reading more writing if anyone else has ever done the same.

The Gift of the Road Trip

In the 90s, you said that when your fullest sense of the world
Comes from what’s programmed and
Beamed down to your dusty, isolated, small town television set,
The implicit message is that none of what appears on the screen
Could ever really be
“For you”;
None of its images or stories

None of its places or people
Not even its sound
Could ever be things you truly
“move with.”
I’ve always known you were right
And I learned on my own that
When you can never feel part of the outside
Resentment
Becomes a comfort
And your four walls
A dead womb.

Teenaged, I watched you clear all the light from a screen.
Your dark silhouette and the slow pull of your hand
Cloaked the vibrant terror behind you in erasure’s dark curtain,
Until once again you emerged
To invert twilight into dawn.
The dopamine drip made my limbs quiver and shake and move
Even long after you said goodnight to the ghouls
and your sound disappeared
Between the red rocks.

Ten years later, I passed your childhood town

Unexpectedly:
A spot in the road called Mercer, in Pennsylvania,
Pop. 1,911.
I stopped to see the
Gravel roads and boarded up houses,

The suspicious stares and a red brick school building;
The gas stations like the ones everywhere else and
Large confederate flags in Northern lawns.
It was an atrophied place, lit by the glow of television.
I laughed at my reflection
I got the hell out
I moved with a world