I am told to work it out
Work out my impossible questions?
Work it out. Your circus of dreams
Your day in day out
Years in years out
Submitted without comment

I’d like to submit
A request for wishful thinking

That we all just
Take it down a notch
And find a soft revolution
Behind eyelids
Like curtains
Stealing time,
Letting life play back
Like a comic strip

I would sleep like Sleeping Beauty
Like shrinking in the light
and vastness
At the seashore on holiday
Like fourth of July fireworks
Fizzling in the mud

Like the dinosaurs
and the dead parts of the forest
like the mummies 
And ancient pictographs 
in hidden caves
Like the museums
honoring death and life
Quietly

Like Pompeii
Whose sophistication
We’ll never *really* see
Like bears in the winter
They understand me
or marine life
On the ocean floor
Holding the earth’s
Oldest stories
(unfathomable, unreachable)

I won’t be making
anyone happy
Neither capitalists
Nor the government
Surveilling me from afar:
Me in a hurry, me out of step,
me out of tune
Me asleep.

—Maddy Hughes