The System

The child’s mind is

a sketchbook, a butterfly net, a magnifying glass,

a blue jay hiding in the wild green scrub,

a mocking bird singing jazzy renditions

of a cardinal’s song.

The child’s mind is unbounded

by bedroom walls, by picket fences, by street corners,

not even by the atmosphere that binds us all.

Thoughts, thoughts, thoughts,

dance to the rhythm of imagination

and play the music of dreams:

sometimes a serenade to a dead goldfish

carried off by the swirling currents of a white bowl;

sometimes an étude studying the sky

and its various fluffy white animal shapes.

Other times, a child dreams of a fantasie,

of unicorns and tooth fairies and presents under a tree,

though a hidden door, under the mountains, over the sea,

and then back again as morning light flirts with undrawn curtains.

If ‘human’ is defined by the human mind

that sings harmonies to the beat of the human heart,

then one is most human when one is a child,

for the child’s mind sings with brilliant soprano

full of vivid rainbows and crisp fall air,

unlike the mind of an adult,

which sings in carefully-patterned monotone

because the system demands it.

The mind of an adult

sometimes thinks in sonatas:

Introduction, Exposition

Development, Recapitulation,

Coda. Repeat.

Other times, it thinks

in canon and variation.

Melody, melody, melody

Repeat, repeat, repeat.

It changes a few notes,

and hopes nobody will notice the similarity.

The mind of an adult is

a groomed blue macaw perched royally on a swing

within in a white picket fence.

It sings of crackers

and has forgotten

its lush, emerald green forest home.

The mind of an adult

learned to cut down the growing forest

and send it to the plants for production

of wooden floors, wooden walls, and stiff, wooden furniture.

Perhaps the forest will grow again,

starting with small shoots of idea,

blooming into flowering thought,

slowly progressing toward unbound imagination,

but through the system, mind of the adult,

will simply cut the weeds and pick the wildflowers,

in order to keep the yard carefully manicured

to impress the neighbors.