Whenever I become
focused on something,
career day dawns.
I think about how
to make my mind
calm, and I want to be
a therapist.
I read a fantastic fiction
and I want to be
a master of long
diction. I drink a
perfect cup of coffee
and imagine myself
before the giant
La Marzocco, keeping
my man bun from
knocking over
the spider plant behind.
Deep inside a poem,
I imagine myself deep
inside poetry, reading
and teaching and writing,
wringing a little visibility
from the contemporary
language and maybe a
few dollars too. I need to
lose myself a little further
in the woods and lose my
selfish orienteering, my
compass that only points
back to my mind's eyes
whose eyes are always bigger
than my mind. A career is an excuse
for a life, a refuse pile
filled with refusals that were
improperly recycled.
A good compost pile loams
and steams with foamy
dreams, effervescence
formed not by legibility,
by feelings billowing,
feeling around for shadows
that need never become
solid holes. Summary
resolution: let the job
idea resolve like a mushroom,
giving way to day's rays
whose light lights every act
remunerated or not
acknowledged or not
valued or not
remembered or not.
Roman Ryan 