Let go thy mind, poet!

What's going on in the poet's mind when he's daydreaming? I work for a living. I fly a lot. I go into the office and plug in my laptop and hook up to the network my employer provides and to the Internet. I make a few telephone calls. I look at my weekly calendar (handwritten, no Palm Pilots here!). I make a few calls, a few plans, a few decisions. I work my way down a list of things to do, either mentally or on paper, tallying the day, ticking off my chores. I pack up, ride the elevator to the garage or outside the building to a cab. I move on.

I wouldn't say I'm experiencing much, or even thinking, for that matter. I am fulfilling a routine, maybe. I am sleeping without dreaming.

Occasionally, I wake up and look around me. Today it happened on the Delta Shuttle, Washington to New York. It was full of people just like me. I willed myself to start dreaming, that is, taking in everything in my metallic environment I could take in, including images from my own depths. Headlines, overhead bins, headrests, heads . . . I wonder if other people do this? I wonder if I am ever the object of somebody else's day dream?

Soon enough, it started to come, that familiar flood of words and images and sensations that I need as a poet, that makes for the poet in me. I pull an orange (!) journal out of my briefcase, a retractable pencil, and start capturing bits and pieces . . .

"A binder clip was traveling to Poukeepsie."
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"The fresh things became stuck in committee."
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"The French action is precise and airless."
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"Everyone's bending over in his hair cream."
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"A blast of cold air will remake them."
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"Protesting, the models wear last year's fashions to bed."
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"Until such time as we have run out of until."
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"Another question you mean it like that."
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"I am sorry, sir, but you're flying the Delta Shuttle and your choice is cheese and crackers."
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"We have been vectored and no one even took a vote."
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"A basic slip of the lung was all."
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"Dog eared and stained and then landed safely."

My wife reminds me that I once had the capacity to sit around and do nothing for hours. She says this like a eulogy. She is only partly wrong. I used not to fear the consequences of it.