Worry

I’d like mornings more
if there wasn’t such an expectation
I woke up today and it was bright outside
I was worried I’d slept through my alarm
I don’t work today
I had a sense of relief
The earth turned enough to show me the sun again
and I was worried
Came back from the strangescape of dream to find
mother earth glowing
and I had a sense of alarm

The self is mostly autonomous
Walking anodyne and senseless
Pressurized and worried
The mind is pitilessly subsumed with bills and contracts and leases and the prestidigitation of a hollow sucking wind
Empty ghost in the rafters of my soul saying
This should be worry
This should be concern

My pink-goo-brain has been coerced
into panic at a sunrise
But
then again
screens amuse our boredom and cars will soon
drive themselves
leaving us free to do what we will
I click a few times and products are delivered to my door
what more could we ask for?
what kind of luddite would trade away Netflix?
What must the prize be?
Agency? Clarity?

Stewing in dissatisfaction, I sat in my car and smoked a cigarette. A woman walked to her mailbox, grabbed her mail, and walked away. She read a letter as she walked. Probably some problem. Some expected bad news. Why would you read it as you walked? But,

Her hips swayed in time with the breeze, her sundress over her curves. She walked away from me with ass swaying, exposed shoulders. I wonder what the letter was about. I can’t imagine what she read, striding down sun-dappled sidewalk in this summer. She could probably tell me hundreds of stories. The leaves were shaking in the breeze to match the birdsong.

I’m no longer a little boy turning over rocks to find bugs. I’m no longer an angry misanthrope, breaking peoples’ lawn decorations. I can’t remember what the skeleton key was. To see, understand, and form a way of living. I am a man with no idea what to do. I’d like to find the secret, the antidote to this dystopia. In the meantime, I’ll watch this stranger walk the sidewalk with her nice ass, and think “This is close.”