Her existential crisis,
a late-onset failure to thrive,
found no crumb of meaning
in this hand-to-mouth life. It felt
too similar to the assembly line itself.
To even think
on it, especially when traveling
on the streetcar,
or in bed at night,
or at the grocery store --
that was abomination, admitting
to herself that she was but waiting
to die.
With a practiced breath
she steadied her thoughts.
In her mind’s eye, she pressed
dawn’s dew from a clump of moss
and let it drip
onto her tongue, parched
from singing the stars to sleep.
In the outward world, she exhaled
slowly, swaying
with the streetcar’s pull
toward the factory. She smiled,
her thoughts stretching
like a cat from sleep, refreshed.
Wildness had long fled
her flesh, her physical life captured
in a consumerist orbit
around this modern sun-god
of eternal hungering.
Hers seemed a joyless people,
staid and satisfaction-fearing.
Such people who would desire
to wall up the wind, lest it beguile
a curious mind to feel
a true and natural power.
Such a world inspired
only emptiness. She survived
because she’d decided
her mind was a lawless place.
Within, she found a raw landscape,
hers alone, where a life could be made
idea-foraging,
making camp in a moral debate,
and seeking the fertile fields of soul.
Here her nomadic mind worked
out her own domestication,
unbound
and traveling light, cultivating
her existence like an artisan’s craft.
Rivers ran for a living, too.
Stagnation so quickly turned
water to poison.
All flow and cycles and seasons felt
entropy’s breath at their necks,
and never since stopped
to see if they were still being chased.
The streetcar squealed to her stop.
Now she’d cross the street and spend
a twelve-hour shift working
the line, all the while traversing
a rocky steppe of her mindlands,
choosing stones that struck
her heart as treasure.
Dreamcraft 