Dream Delivery Service
You are a slightly graying slightly paunchy poet on a
bicycle in the hours before dawn, riding the city streets under arc lights,
steering around potholes, in varying weather. Sometimes coyotes run beside you
until they weary or veer off. This isn’t a dream.
You began out of an existential desperation to find meaning,
or maybe to lose weight, or to vie for fame in the treacherous academic world:
publish or perish. It’s hard to stand out.
So you drop out and climb aboard an ’85 bicycle with a frame
size too big for you. Everything, and I mean everything, you might possibly
need for the next 30 days goes into a pair of panniers and a seal line bag.
You cannot escape your depression or pedal fast enough to
leave yourself behind.
But once in a new town you set up shop. For ten hours a day
you compose dreams—an annoying woman at the Poetry Foundation called you out,
saying they were in fact poems—you cycle out dreams as if they were miles and
then in the early hours of morning you deliver them, 40 – 50 miles per day,
every day, because not for one second do your subscribers stop dreaming. Then
it’s back to the coffee shop and the keyboard and the sombiescent experience of
channeling the dreams of others.
When do you sleep, oh Poet Dreamer?
Check out the work of Mathias Svalina of the Dream Delivery
Service. I heard him speak at the Poetry Foundation: Off the Shelf, where he
inspired poets and cyclists.
Follow him n Instagram and Twitter—because you literally
will exhaust yourself following him
Comments