Thoreau’s Wish [Free Verse]

Caspar David Friedrich, Arctic Shipwreck (1824)

“I desire that there may be as many different persons in the world as possible”

Henry david thoreau, Walden

Too many people wish that the world consisted
of those who held the same views as they -

who loved what they loved,
who believed what they believed,
who would do what they would do.

I can't imagine a more boring world than that.

If there aren't those with different:

ideas,
desires,
beliefs,
and values, 

then who will show me something new:
something that -- for good or for ill --
will change my world 
and advance my understanding.

If truth be told,
I'd just as soon spend time 
among the crazy sages who --
having rejected all programming --
will not be made prisoner to a train schedule,
let alone to a norm or convention or protocol.

The madmen who shaman one 
out of all mental conventions.

But such as they are hand forged,
each vibrating at his or her own wavelength --
hard to see and
 not easily found.

Mad Saints, Poets, & Lovers

In the ecstatic madness
sits a different kind of bliss
so untethered that you drift
far from the familiar.

There is no cord unwinding
to snap you into place,
and you may float into
and out of 
your original face.

And when one stands screaming,
unwilling to be shooshed -
naked as a J-bird -
immune to being rushed,
you may find a freedom
that would terrify the rest:
the homeless kind of freedom
of the sanity dispossessed.