This morning, just after I woke up and just before I admitted that fact to the world, I daydream fantasized a poem.   I was in an old house, but it was light and airy.  Big wooden windows opened by breaking a paint seal.  Dust motes swimming, diving and rising as the calico’s tail creates a stir from the sill.  Hardwood floors.  High ceilings.  Mismatched furniture.  Desk from a yard sale.  Couch handed down from somebody I don’t remember.  Plastic crates stolen from Purity Dairy holding books, tapes, . . . actual albums.

I see it, hear it, taste it.  I remember it so well, and yet it is no specific place I have ever been.  Rather, this is the vision that remains from long ago feelings.

It’s a rental.  Upstairs a struggling musician lives with his girlfriend.  He’s a bass player, thank god, not a drummer.  The back screen door has a wire coil pulling it shut.  Back porch a slab of concrete with four steps down to the yard, a patchwork quilt of grass, weeds, and bare earth.   Grass has a hard time growing under the constant shade of such big old trees.

I feel it.  It is a house of youthful hope and ancient desire.  It holds a memory of simplicity unappreciated in its time.  It was a place I think I might have been once in the 80s.

When the feeling has been explored, my poet’s mind begins to consider structure and rhythm.  I anticipate the writing by combining words and rolling them around in my mouth awhile like analyzing a vintage Cabernet.

The last line might be, “How could I ever want more?”

Then, finally, I rise from my bed, abandon my theta state wet dream, and turn once again to the world of work and worry.