The Wilderness Period

October 2017 to October 2018. A writer finding what they are. Six dispatches from the process.

✶ Interpretive key

Read Piece IV — Confession first if you want to know what all of this is actually doing. The author tells you directly: trickster, player, showman, rubber dagger, protective liar. Every puzzle in the archive has this poem as its key. The confusion is intentional. The protection is real.

I · 5 Oct 2017 · /life Don’t Follow Dreams,
Lead Your Life A manifesto disguised as a rambling poem. Dreams are counsel, not destination. The liver who languishes in the lake of the life never lived. Poem · philosophy · here/now
II · 10 Oct 2017 · /life Monday Piece
of Mind A love poem addressed to the Ether because the subject won’t read it. Steemit as an accidental confessional. She will never read this. Poem · personal · Chill
III · 10 Oct 2017 · /life Some Questions About
Content & Creation A meta-poem that performs the anxiety it describes. Posted same day as Monday. The staircase lineation asks: is this art or a scam parading as art? Meta-poem · form · Steemit economics
IV · 25 Jan 2018 · /steemit Screw the Thumbnail:
A Confession The trickster declares itself. A jester’s manifesto and the interpretive key to the whole archive. “To protect those I love, I will lie.” Prose · poetics · trickster archetype
V · 20 Jul 2018 · /comedy 4 Steps to Escape
This Miserable Existence Filed under comedy. Genuine mystical practice in absurdist drag. Each step is real; the comedy tag is the rubber dagger that lets it past your defenses. Essay · self-work · reality navigation
VI · 25 Oct 2018 · /poetry But I Know
They’re There A post-apocalyptic poem from inside a digital enclosure. Inspired by Fallout 3 but doing something far larger. Healthy but not alive. Perfect but not alive. Poem · dystopia · vitality
I · 5 October 2017 · Steemit /life
Don’t Follow Dreams,
Lead Your Life
View on Steemit →
We’ve all been younglings
(some of us still are).
In our youth
we have all been
subject to the substance
of our dreams.
Our dreams,
which daunt us,
haunt us,
hurt us
and heal us,
are the
The Argument in a LinePromises We BreakThis definition of dreams is already the whole argument. A dream is not just a desire or aspiration — it is specifically a commitment made and then abandoned. The framing already contains the verdict: if dreams are promises-broken, then “following your dreams” means chasing your own history of self-betrayal. The poem proposes instead that life is the promises we keep.
With that in mind
(or in text now it seems)
we must
at least
begin to consider,
the means by which
we learn to let go
of all
but the promises we keep.
See, dreams are deceptive
(they’re dreams, it’s what they do).
They’re there,
but they’re never true.
They’re a mish-mash
of thoughts
and perspectives
and perceptions
that propagate
with preposterous
and prolific
persuasions
toward the notion that
Recurring SystemThere/Then vs Here/NowThis is the author’s central coordinate system, appearing in the Dreams essay (Oct 2017) and refined into the formal HERE;NOW notation in 4 Steps (Jul 2018) — nine months later. The idea: your actual location is always here, always now, and dreams are precisely the mechanism that convinces you to experience your life as happening somewhere else, in some other time. Following a dream means living in an address that doesn’t exist.
To clarify
(coz dreams hate clarity)
I am saying that dreams
are nothing but dreams.
They will always exist
in a world that is not real.
Life, however
(and living, for that matter)
is not a product
of dreams
but of vision,
action,
interaction,
and engagement.
Our lives contain all the freedom
to live in the manner we choose.
Our decisions, not our dreams,
determine our path.
Our actions decide
the outcome.
Dreams are not evil.
They aren’t useless either.
What they are is an insight
into what our brain wants
and how it makes sense of
what has gone on
in the real.
Therefore,
(yay, conclusion is coming)
Dreams are important
and
The ThesisDreams as CounselThe distinction between “destination” and “counsel” is the whole argument. Counsel is what a wise advisor gives you: diagnostic, informative, not directive. The dream tells you what your brain wants and how it’s processing reality — that’s genuinely useful. But it can’t tell you what to do. It is a symptom, not a plan. Vision, action, engagement do the work the dream can only describe.
Our lives
(on the other hand)
Are all we have,
and Life will kill us
in the end
any way.
And at the end
(coz it’s coming, I promise)
The dreams we had will
be forgotten
in favor of the memories
of the life that we lived.
And each life is led by the
Triple PunThe LiverThe pun is flagged and then deployed anyway: liver (the organ), liver (one who lives), live (to live). The alliterative avalanche — liver/languishes/lake/life/lived — risks tipping into self-parody. It doesn’t, because the content is sincere. The person who doesn’t live their life still has a liver; the organ persists while the living doesn’t happen. The joke is the argument.
Feel free to dream.
Dream a whole day away.
It is your life.
You are living it.
Whether you like it
or not.
Dreams come and go.
Lives do too.
Living in a dream
Means dreaming a life away.
And dreams are simply
tricks of the mind.
Our dreams are the promises we break with our selves,
Our lives are the promises we keep.
Analysis

“Follow your dreams” is one of the most durable pieces of received wisdom in Western popular culture, and also one of the most thoroughly critiqued. The author’s version of the critique is distinct from the standard cynical inversion (“dreams are just fantasy, be realistic”). Dreams are neither villainized nor dismissed — they are precisely placed. Useful as diagnostic tools, useless as navigational ones. The distinction is clinical and generous at once.

The poem was the author’s third post on Steemit. The parenthetical aside — “(coz dreams hate clarity)” — signals the self-awareness that will become the house style: the author noting their own rhetorical moves while making them. Trickster habit, already visible in week one.

“preposterous and prolific persuasions” is either a stylistic risk or a stylistic mistake depending on what you think the poem is doing. If you take it as earnest, it looks like someone who discovered alliteration and got carried away. If you take it as performance — and the author’s self-description as a trickster/showman makes this the correct reading — it is the poem mocking the very mechanism it is criticizing: dreams do propagate with preposterous prolific persuasions. The over-the-top alliteration enacts the over-the-top seductiveness of dream-logic. The form is the argument.

Same logic applies to “liver/languishes/lake/life/lived.” The pun is flagged (“pun intended”) so it can’t embarrass anyone. Flagging it and deploying it anyway is the jester move: you can’t be offended by the joke if the joker already acknowledged it was a joke.

The “there and then instead of here and now” formulation appears here in its first version, loosely worded. Nine months later, in 4 Steps (July 2018), the same coordinate system gets its formal notation: HERE;NOW with a semicolon, treated as a logical address. The semicolon is the upgrade: it turns a vague sentiment into a precise instruction, the way a GPS coordinate is more useful than “somewhere around here.”

Reading the archive chronologically makes the philosophical development visible. The Dreams essay is where the author discovers the idea. 4 Steps is where they figure out what to do with it. The Fallout poem (October 2018) is the same idea from the inside of its opposite: what a life entirely “there and then” looks like from within its enclosure.

II · 10 October 2017 · Steemit /life
Monday Piece
of Mind
View on Steemit →
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Ode to a Monday Chill

Sometimes a Monday
means fortification.
Sometimes it’s dull,
painless and boring;
sometimes it’s filled
with dread.
Seldom is it peaceful,
or pleasant,
or vibrant,
and never
is it cast in romance.
This is the Lie of Life
that we tell
this is our
lasting delusion.
That Monday
is doomed to be
hated forever,
when in Truth
the Universe
doesn’t care
that it exists.
But it still matters to me
that this Monday is different,
because it is filled with the
promise of
Specific ConceptChill (capitalised)Not the slang. The author is about to define it, and the definition matters. Chill is not relaxation, not happiness, not comfort in the generic sense. It is a specific quality of experience in the presence of one particular person — the pleasure of witnessing the wonder with which She sees the world, the joy of hearing her laughing. It is the register of peace that requires a witness. It cannot be achieved alone.
You see this Monday
may end up insignificant;
it may fade into the fog
of collective forgetfulness.
It is unlikely
to change the world.
Artwork — not available in this archive 4ef38e3887b00cfb63def164d9f77e54.png
But the beauty of the Universe is that one in a million happens all the time,
and somehow I’m hoping that all the time happens here.
It’s a foolish notion,
naive perhaps’
but still I cannot deny it…
This Monday is different because I know that there will be
Chill.
Perhaps I should explain
this thing I call
Chill.
A harder task
than you’d imagine.
Chill is the pleasure
while witnessing the wonder
with which
She sees the World.
It is the Joy
of
hearing her laughing
feeling her smiling
and
seeing her happy.
It is the Comfort
of
Knowing
that there
is a
Kindred Spirit.
A Fellow
Intertextual ReferenceLeaf on the WindHoban “Wash” Washburne in Firefly / Serenity: “I am a leaf on the wind — watch how I soar.” Spoken moments before he is killed. To invoke this here — in a love poem about two nomads who might one day float side by side — is to bring the entire weight of that scene: the beauty, the precariousness, the sudden end. The hope is real; so is its fragility. The author knows the reference.→ Wash, Firefly Wiki
Perhaps it’s the thrill
of the Possibility
That we may
One Day
float
Side by Side
a Thought I seem compelled to Indulge.
But regardless of the weather,
Chill is a Blessing
Bestowed by
a
Beautiful Soul.
Even if this Monday means
a joint and a pizza
and
being on our Merries,
It is still going to make me Happy
because
She will be Near Me again.
“I adore YOU”
She always
Makes
My Heart
Smile.
Signatured-_-bThe author’s recurring ASCII sign-off across the archive. A face with headphones on. The digital handshake that closes most of these posts — it appears in Questions too. Not a throwaway; a consistent signal of identity, the Nomad’s version of a compositor’s mark. The headphones suggest: this is a person who listens.
Artwork — not available in this archive 4d6be26505b780e458e8d33cdee25e78.png
Analysis

“She will never read this” is the pivot on which the whole poem turns. Everything before it is addressed to She; everything after it is addressed to the Ether. The reader has been watching a private moment that was always public — Steemit is a blockchain, this post is immutable and visible to anyone. The author knows this. The declaration of safety (“So I’m Safe / to Declare to / the Ether”) is simultaneously true (She won’t read it) and false (you are reading it right now).

This is the specific strangeness of the early Steemit environment: a platform that paid for attention created the conditions for performed intimacy. You could speak a private thing publicly and trust that the target of the speech, embedded in the same social context, was for some reason exempt from the audience. The logic doesn’t hold but the feeling did. The poem is honest about its own contradiction rather than pretending it isn’t one.

The poem takes its time defining Chill because it has to: the concept is specific enough that the slang term won’t do. What the author describes is not relaxation or contentment but a relational state — it requires the presence of a particular person, and its content is watching that person experience the world. Chill is joy-at-witnessing-joy: the pleasure of being near someone who finds things wonderful.

This is a more sophisticated emotional concept than the poem’s easy-going delivery suggests. It is also the antidote to the Smoker (from the October 2018 piece, written a year later): the Smoker’s depression is structural isolation, the retreat from connection into ritual numbing. Chill is the opposite structure — connection as the source of the particular peace that makes Mondays survivable.

The original post embeds three images at structural junctures: before the poem begins, between the “unlikely to change the world” stanza and the “one in a million” line, and at the end. The images aren’t available in this archive, but their placement matters: in 2017 Steemit, images were currency. A post with images got more engagement than text-only. The author used this consciously — the same day (October 10, 2017), they posted “Some Questions About Content and Creation,” which directly interrogates whether their lineation choices and posting strategies are art or economic optimisation. The two posts are the same question from opposite angles.

III · 10 October 2017 · Steemit /life
Some Questions About
Content & Creation
View on Steemit →
Artwork — not available in this archive c6324602a71af2f65584d54e089dbefc.png
I’ve got to get writing again.
Go figure.
Goddamn it
I hate this
I’ve got all of this thought
that I feel
should not be recorded
not because I’m ashamed,
but simply because I don’t think anyone will
read it
Also, take a look
at my
sentences.
I’m still trying
to figure
out
if this is a
choice
I’m making in every
moment
or if I’m
unconsciously trying to make
almost nothing
into something worth a lot
more than
it actually is.
Is this just
a con?
A game?
A trick?
Or is this a legitimate
excercise
in poetry?
Is it art?
or a Scam
parading as art?
do the answers
to any of these
mostly meaningless
questions
and
statements
have
any
significant
impact
on the state of
any one
state
of
mind?
Do they acheive
anything
of value at all?
Have
I
Wasted
Your
Time?
And since the world
has agreed
(or seems to at least)
to the notion
that
Platform-Specific ArgumentTIME IS MONEYOn Steemit in 2017, this was literally true in a way it isn’t on other platforms. Upvotes converted to Steem cryptocurrency. The author’s attention-capture was directly monetized — for them as poster, for Steemit as platform. The rhetorical question “Have I wasted your time?” is therefore also an economic question: have I extracted value from you under false pretenses? The poem knows exactly what platform it’s on and what the platform’s economy is doing to the question of artistic value.→ Steemit, Wikipedia
is your
livelihood
now suddenly
at risk?
Have I
deceived you
into sacrificing
a part of your life
into going
absolutely
nowhere
in particular
at all?
Artwork — not available in this archive b502041a8b0a9bc509755f54363385eb.png

Peace, Love and a Little Madness — Nomad — d-_-b

P.S. This is the last of my weird poems for a little while :)

Analysis

The poem asks directly: is the fragmented lineation a deliberate choice or an unconscious attempt to inflate thin content? The correct answer is both, and the poem already knows this. The form enacts the question: each word dropped to its own line performs the anxiety of whether the word deserves its own line. The poem is simultaneously the object of its own criticism and the best possible argument for its own defence.

The staircase reaches its nadir at Have / I / Wasted / Your / Time? — five words that did not need five lines, deployed in five lines. This is the poem calling its own bluff at maximum compression. If this is a waste of time, then these five lines are the most concentrated waste of all, which makes them the most efficient part of the poem, which means they weren’t wasted.

The final question — have I deceived you into sacrificing a part of your life into going absolutely nowhere — is the poem’s most honest moment. It is also its most sophisticated trap. You have already read this far, which means you have already been convinced to keep reading, which means the question has answered itself. If the poem had no value you would have stopped. The fact that you’re asking the question with the author is evidence that the poem did something.

This connects directly to the Confession (January 2018, three months later): the trickster confesses to using riddles and puzzles to confuse, but also promises that when it makes sense, it will make sense. The Questions poem is the early version of that contract — the author admitting they might be running a con and asking you to keep watching anyway.

Both pieces posted October 10, 2017. Monday is a love poem of genuine warmth, public-private, structurally three-image, designed to be read. Questions is an attack on itself, explicitly hostile to its own existence, ending on “nowhere in particular at all.” Posting them together is not an accident. Monday earns the attention; Questions interrogates whether earning attention is what the author should be doing.

The PS of Questions — “This is the last of my weird poems for a little while :)” — turns out not to be true. The archive continues. The author kept writing the weird poems. The announcement of stopping is the jester move: lower expectations, then deliver. See also the Confession: “I will always arrive unexpected.”

IV · 25 January 2018 · Steemit /steemit
Screw the Thumbnail:
A Confession
View on Steemit →
This shit is not safe work.
My work, that is.
What work is that? You ask.
(You didn’t, but I’ll say you do)
This work.
What work?
This.
This?
Yes, this…
This is what you do?
Yes.
And what is that?
What?
That.
That?
Yes.
(Sorry, where is this going?)
Right you are…. back to business.
Business?
Yes. Business. What is your business?
My - my business?
WHAT DO YOU DO?
Who, me?
STOP IT!
What?
STOP TOYING WITH ME AND ANSWER THE BLOODY QUESTION THAT STARTED THIS WHOLE THING!
I’m sorry. But I don’t remember that question. I know there was one.
Why is this shit not safe work? you say.
(you don’t, but I’ll say you do)
Well, because my work is
to play and to question
my goal is to end with a bow
I’m a
Mythological AlignmentThe TricksterNot just self-description: mythological alignment. Loki, Coyote, Anansi, Hermes — the trickster is the figure who operates outside rules in order to expose them. The trickster creates chaos that ultimately serves order; tells truths that direct speech cannot; uses disguise, misdirection, and play to access what earnestness cannot reach. The author is not saying they are funny. They are saying they have a specific structural role in how knowledge moves.
In my - my mind, I’m even all three
But know that I’m only a
Historical RoleThe Court JesterThe licensed fool in medieval courts who could say what no one else could — specifically because it was said as comedy, and comedy was not held to the same standard of truth as direct speech. The joke gave cover for the critique. Lear’s fool says more true things than anyone else in the play, precisely because he’s a fool. The author is claiming this tradition: I have a mask; the mask lets me say what I need to say.→ Jester, Wikipedia
My
The WeaponThe Rubber DaggerThe jester’s weapon looks like it can’t hurt you. That’s the point: it gets past your defenses. The rubber dagger draws blood after the fact, when you replay the joke and realize what it was actually saying. The author’s comedy framing — filing genuine mystical practice under /comedy, writing self-interrogating poems that say they’re probably worthless — is the rubber exterior of a sharp argument. You accepted it as harmless. Now it’s inside your thinking. you see, m’lady
(teehee)
I confuse you, to amuse me
So when it makes sense
You’ll see
I have nothing, but love for thee, my leige.
I know that I’m bound to offend thee,
but I trust that you’re able to forgive me
when I show thee, that it was me
who was there to protect thee, all along.
I will always arrive unexpected.
I will always speak my mind.
I will always use riddles, puzzles and symbols,
(because I think that way, okay)
And
This is why I have a mask. This is why I hide.
This is why I won’t make sense. Until I suddenly do.
And then it’ll blow your mind…

I’m back from the wilderness, and ready to PLAY.

Analysis

The opening dialogue is the author interrogating themselves, playing both questioner and subject, and demonstrating the very evasiveness they are confessing to. The WHAT DO YOU DO sequence is not comedy padding — it is evidence. The questioner cannot get a straight answer. The subject deflects, loses the thread, apologises, and then answers an adjacent question rather than the one asked. The reader has just watched the trickster in operation before the trickster has even explained what they are.

The parentheticals — “You didn’t, but I’ll say you do” — are a signature move across the archive. The author attributes agency to the reader that the reader doesn’t have, then proceeds on that basis. It’s a way of making the reader complicit in the conversation without asking their permission. You didn’t ask the question; you are now asking the question.

Read against the other five pieces, this poem retroactively explains them all. The Questions poem (“Is this a con?”): yes, and it’s intentional, and the confusion is the point. The comedy tag on 4 Steps: the rubber dagger. The Monday poem’s public-private inversion: arriving unexpected. The Dreams essay’s alliterative excess: “I think that way, okay.”

The phrase “I will always arrive unexpected” is a statement about form as much as timing. Every piece in the archive that appears to be one thing and is another — the self-help parody that is genuine self-work, the love poem that interrogates its own sincerity, the meta-poem that performs the anxiety it describes — is the trickster arriving unexpected. The mask isn’t concealment; it’s the only way the content can travel.

The three early pieces (Dreams, Monday, Questions) were all posted in October 2017. The Confession was posted January 2018 — three months later. The Questions poem ended: “This is the last of my weird poems for a little while.” Then three months of silence. Then: “I’m back from the wilderness, and ready to PLAY.”

The wilderness is literal — the Nomad persona is one of actual geographic movement — but it is also internal. The three-month gap between promising to stop and returning with a confession is the gap between the writer who is still figuring out if this is worth doing and the writer who has decided: yes, and here is what I am doing and why, stated plainly, so we can proceed. The Confession is a clearing of the air. The next posts (4 Steps, then the Triptych, then the Trees) are more assured. The wilderness made them possible.

V · 20 July 2018 · Steemit /comedy comedy
4 Steps to Escape
This Miserable Existence
View on Steemit →
Artwork — not available in this archive 032488f50e8567ff3750bcb9c3de0694.png

SOOOO… I’m guessing you’re reading now. (YAY)

One — Acknowledge Yourself

Go to a mirror. Look the other you in the eyes. Are you happy to see yourself? Doesn’t matter, you’re stuck with the one you see for the time being, so get acquainted. Take in as much of your
Redefined TermMorphic FieldRupert Sheldrake’s contested concept from the 1980s: invisible fields that carry morphogenetic information, explaining how organisms know how to develop. Contested because it has no known mechanism and makes predictions that haven’t been confirmed. The author takes the term and redefines it in the same parenthetical: “The Shapes in the Mirror that Your Brain calls You.” This strips the pseudoscience and keeps the useful kernel: your body-image, the mental model your brain maintains of your physical form. The jargon is the rubber dagger — it sounds mystical, but the instruction underneath is genuine: spend time looking at yourself without judgment until you can do it without judgment.→ Morphic resonance, Wikipedia (The Shapes in the Mirror that Your Brain calls You) as you can. Do not rush. Without a clear, recent morphic imprint,
The Absurdism Doing WorkExtradimensional StrainThe comedy tag earning its keep. “Extradimensional strain” sounds like a medical condition from a sci-fi RPG. What it is actually describing: the dissociation and ungroundedness that comes from not recognising yourself in the mirror — a real phenomenon, associated with depersonalisation disorder and with the kind of chronic self-avoidance that precedes depression. The absurdist framing is the rubber dagger: the instruction passes through your comedy defenses before you realise it was serious. What point is there to going off to another reality if you’re completely nuts when you get there? Spend as long as you need to taking note of everything about you that you notice. If you find yourself making judgments and subjective statements about the person in the mirror, you are NOT READY. Additionally, if you cannot look yourself in the eye and believe that it is you who is looking back, you are NOT READY. Keep coming back to the mirror and repeating the exercise until you can confront yourself, unashamed and unafraid.

Two — Locate Yourself

Know where you are. Wherever you find yourself, be aware of your position in the Universe. This is simple to understand, but difficult to master. Your location is always
The Coordinate SystemHERE;NOWThe semicolon is philosophical work. Not “here and now” as vague sentiment but HERE;NOW as a logical address — a coordinate pair, like GPS. You are always at this address. The question is whether you are experiencing yourself as being at this address or are absorbed in There;Then. This notation first appears loosely in the Dreams essay (Oct 2017) as “there and then instead of here and now.” Nine months of thinking produced the semicolon. See also: Eckhart Tolle, Buddhist sati (mindfulness as remembering where you are). It is that simple. Here is where you are Now. Now is when you are Here. But are you actually Here Now, or are you in fact absorbed in something There and Then. Where have you been before you got to Here Now? Have you always been Here Now? This step can be considered complete when the phrase “I AM HERE NOW” can be instantly, confidently and truthfully said.

Three — Identify Your Current Reality

Once you know Who you are, When you are, and Where you are, you can move on to the first tricky part: WHY YOU ARE. Go to the mirror, look yourself in the eye and repeat this instruction:
Mystic DragCracks in the CageJungian shadow work dressed as mystical incantation. The “cage” is the ego-structure — the organised self, the habitual defenses. The “cracks” and “chinks” are the shadow material: the complexes, the repressed content, the places where the self-model is inconsistent or defended. The “map” is what psychotherapy also produces: a navigable representation of your own psychological terrain. The instruction is real. The mystical language is the rubber dagger again.→ Shadow, Jungian psychology Explore the nooks and crannies of your mind, chase down the demons and deal with them how you see fit, but know that you will never be free until they agree to go on their own. While on mental adventure, PAY ATTENTION to all that your mind reveals to you. Keep a record if you feel it’s necessary.

Four — Find a Gate to a Chosen Reality

Once you have trained yourself to know yourself and once you are practiced in locating yourself both inside and outside your mind, the edges of your Current Reality should be well-defined. Begin by making a wish-list of aspects you wish to find in your next reality. Define them well and begin a search. Look for places and people that bring different realities into being — they will guide you to their gates. Follow whom you choose.

Analysis

The comedy tag is doing load-bearing work. On Steemit, categories affected discovery and audience expectation. Filing a piece of genuine mystical self-work under /comedy is the Confession’s rubber dagger made structural: the piece gets past your irony defenses because it announced itself as not serious. By the time you realise Steps One through Three are describing real psychological practices, you have already done them or considered doing them.

This is also protection. The person who posts earnest self-help on a platform that rewards cynicism risks mockery. The comedy tag preempts the criticism by agreeing in advance that this is funny. The content survives because the container took the hit.

Step One is a mirror exercise used in body dysmorphia treatment, self-compassion practice, and dissociation therapy. The NOT READY conditions — making judgments, not believing the reflection is you — are clinical descriptions of specific psychological states that precede the ability to do any other self-work.

Step Two is mindfulness: the practice of grounding attention in present-moment sensory experience, specifically the practice of noting that you have drifted (“There;Then”) and returning (“HERE;NOW”). Described with a precision that basic mindfulness instructions rarely achieve.

Step Three is Jungian shadow work: the systematic investigation of the psyche’s defended regions. The incantation is the only mystical element; the instruction is psychotherapeutically standard.

Step Four is values clarification plus social capital mapping: figure out what you actually want, then find communities already moving toward it. Standard life-coaching practice, not at all magical, extremely effective.

The most counterintuitive line in the piece, and the one that earns the most scrutiny. The instruction is: chase down the demons and deal with them how you see fit, but the exit condition is not defeat but agreement. The demons have to decide to leave. You can’t drive them out by force.

This is consistent with Jungian and IFS (Internal Family Systems) approaches: the shadow doesn’t yield to suppression, it yields to integration. The part of you that causes problems is doing so for a reason; when you understand the reason and address the underlying need, the behaviour changes. Forcing the demon out leaves the need unaddressed. Negotiating with it produces something more durable. The mystical language covers a genuinely sophisticated psychological observation.

VI · 25 October 2018 · Steemit /poetry
But I Know
They’re There
A poem from the post-apocalypse · View on Steemit →
There are trees outside
We don’t see them
We’re not allowed
But I know they’re there
The absence of windows
Makes it hard
To convince
Anyone
But I know they’re there
I’m pretty sure
There are birds too
Not that I know what they
Look like
I shouldn’t know
They exist
But I stole a few
Books from below
The Tautology as SatireForbidden KnowledgeThe second line is funnier and more accurate than the first. “Books are forbidden knowledge” is the stated rule. “The knowledge of them is forbidden” is what the rule actually requires: you cannot enforce the prohibition on books if people know books exist. Information control requires controlling the knowledge that information exists. The tautology is the satire: the system must hide itself to function. This is not Fallout 3 worldbuilding; it is a description of how information control actually works.
But I know they’re there
Day in and day out
Are pretty much where we begin
And end
We
Vocabulary ColonisationLog In / Log OutThe digital vocabulary of session management applied to biological existence. You don’t begin and end your day; you log in and log out. The poem observes this vocabulary adoption and treats it as evidence: the people inside have internalised the platform’s description of their own lives. This is how the enclosure sustains itself without needing walls: by colonising the words available to describe experience, it colonises the experience itself.
Clock what’s inside
And what comes out
Measure it
And eat accordingly
Trees aren’t perfect
The pictures I’ve seen are
Something else
Something I can’t say about
Anything here
Beautiful
And not perfect
All funny angles
And squiggly lines
Not perfect at all
No one cares that
They’re out there
While we’re in here
Connecting and clicking
And synching and cycling
Through the streams
And surges of
Outrageous data
Some say they don’t exist
The trees
I asked someone
Why can’t we go outside
They said we’re safe
Here
Now
Run along
Someone else said we deserve to be here
Caged and collected
So we don’t do
What we did
Before
What did we do before
I want to climb a tree
They’re outside
The birds too
I know it
I know they’re there
The door is there
It’s big huge enormous
Monstrous
I snuck here on my own
It’s easy once you figure
Out the vents
This console
It’s a maze
Of flashing
And phasing
And bleeping
Lights and sounds and text
I shouldn’t be reading
Passwords and puzzles
I shouldn’t be solving
But the trees
I know they’re there
Out beyond this cavernous
Portal
All funny angles
And squiggly lines
I want to climb a tree
I’m in
Soon I’ll be out
Just for a peek
And a climb
And then I’ll sneak
Back to my bunk and
I’ll sleep and I’ll dream
In funny angles
And squiggly lines
One two click
Four five click
Return
Shift
Delete
My life inside here
Is all I’ve had and
It’s the same for everyone
Safe but not new
Clean but not fresh
Perfect
But not
Alive
Hiss
Groan
Clang
Tick tick tick tick tick
Bright light
So white I can’t see
But I feel it
On my face like a breath
Of some great formless being
I heard the word for this
Sunshine
Yes
Sunshine
My skin scrunches up
Like it’s cold
But it’s warm
I can’t see them yet
But I know they’re there
This light
It’s not like what I’m used to
New but not safe
Fresh but not clean
Alive
But not
No it is
It’s perfect
And alive
Finally
I’m starting to see
Swimming shapes
Making solid forms
It’s all
It’s all
It’s all
Squiggly angles
And funny lines
But where are the trees?

This was inspired by playing way too much Fallout 3.

Analysis

The Fallout 3 note is placed at the bottom, after the poem ends, as an almost apologetic addendum — as if the author suspects the poem went somewhere the game hadn’t planned to go and felt it needed explaining. The game provides the setting: underground vault, forbidden outside, data-managed existence. The poem takes that setting and uses it to do something the game never attempted.

In Fallout 3, the vault is a backdrop for adventure. In the poem, the vault is a critique of optimisation culture: healthy but not alive, sinless but not alive, wealthy but not alive, perfect but not alive. This sequence is not a description of a post-nuclear facility. It is a description of a specific contemporary condition: the accumulation of measurable goods — health metrics, moral conformity, financial security, productivity optimisation — in the absence of whatever vitality is. The game gave the author a way to say this from inside a character who has never seen a tree, and therefore doesn’t know what they’re missing.

The anaphora — healthy/sinless/wealthy/perfect but not alive — establishes perfection and life as opposites. Perfect is the inside word; alive is what’s outside. Trees are not perfect. They are beautiful and not perfect, all funny angles and squiggly lines.

Then, at the moment of breakthrough — the light on the face, the skin scrunching, the swimming shapes — the speaker revises the opposition: It’s perfect and alive. The outside collapses the binary the inside had constructed. The world is not the opposite of perfection; it is a different kind of perfection, one that includes squiggly lines and non-standardised angles. The inside’s definition of perfect was just the inside’s very limited vocabulary.

The final line — “But where are the trees?” — lands with full force because the speaker has just gotten what they came for (light, life, the outside) and still hasn’t found the specific thing they dreamed of. The trees may be around the corner. The poem ends before we find out. This is the correct ending: the desire survives the partial satisfaction. The squiggly angles and funny lines are more than enough, and the trees are still out there, and that is exactly right.

When the speaker asks why they can’t go outside, they’re told: “We’re safe / Here / Now / Run along.” The line breaks are devastating. “Here” and “Now” are capitalized, isolated, emphasised. They are the authority’s answer to the question — you are HERE, you are NOW, that is sufficient.

Read against 4 Steps and the Dreams essay, where HERE;NOW is the tool of liberation — the coordinate that grounds you in your own existence — this is the same coordinate weaponised as a cage. “You are HERE, you are NOW” can mean: be present, you are alive. Or it can mean: don’t look outside, don’t ask questions, your reality ends at this address. The same words, used by the system to confine, that the author uses as a tool to navigate. This is the archive’s sharpest observation: the vocabulary of liberation and the vocabulary of control are the same vocabulary. Who is speaking, and why, is everything.

Supplementary Note
The Public Secret

### She will never read this

“She will never read this” pivots the poem’s address mid-flight. Everything before is to She; everything after is to the Ether. But the Ether is public — Steemit is a blockchain, the post is immutable, visible to anyone. The declaration of safety (“So I’m Safe”) is both true and false simultaneously. She won’t read it; you are reading it. The reader becomes an accidental witness to an intimacy that wasn’t meant for them.

### Steemit as confessional medium

The early Steemit environment created strange conditions for performed privacy. A platform that paid for attention monetised the act of being read — which meant that speaking a private thing publicly had economic incentives that were never present in a private journal. The author could declare “I adore YOU” to the Ether, and the Ether would upvote it in Steem cryptocurrency if the declaration was compelling enough. Privacy and publicity were not opposites; they were adjacent affordances on the same interface.

### The Confession’s retroactive reading

Three months after Monday, the Confession announces: “I will always arrive unexpected.” The Monday poem arrived when She wasn’t watching. It was published where she wouldn’t read it, addressing her directly. The confession is inside the poem; the subject of the confession isn’t the audience. This is the protective lie at work long before the Confession names it. The author knew She wasn’t reading. The reader is the unintended beneficiary of that knowledge.

Supplementary Note
The Trap Inside the Question

### The honest question

“Have I deceived you into sacrificing a part of your life into going absolutely nowhere in particular at all?” is a genuinely anxious question. The author in October 2017 is three weeks into their Steemit account, not yet confident in the value of what they’re making, aware that the staircase lineation might be inflating nothing into something. The question is real.

### The trap

The trap is that the question is asked at the end of a poem you have already read to the end. If the poem were truly worthless, you would have left at “Goddamn it I hate this.” The fact that you are here, reading the question about whether you wasted your time, is already the evidence that you didn’t. The poem has used the anxiety about its own failure as the mechanism of its own success.

### Three months later

The Confession, January 2018: “I confuse you, to amuse me. So when it makes sense, you’ll see I have nothing but love for thee.” Questions is the earliest version of this contract: I may be wasting your time; keep watching; when it makes sense it will make sense. The confusion is the delivery system. The question is the rubber dagger arriving before the confession names it.

Supplementary Note
The Protective Lie

### “To protect those I love, I will lie”

The most confessional sentence in the archive. It is presented as one item in a list of structural commitments — will always arrive unexpected, will always speak their mind, will always use riddles — but it carries more ethical weight than the others. It is not a boast. It is a warning and a promise simultaneously.

### What the lie is

The lie is the comedy tag. The lie is the absurdist framing on 4 Steps. The lie is the self-deprecation in Questions (“is this a con?”). The lie is the rubber dagger. The content that couldn’t survive direct delivery — genuine mystical practice, sincere love declarations, sharp political observation — survives because it is wrapped in something that looks like it isn’t serious. The lie is the delivery mechanism for the truth.

### The ethics

This is the trickster’s ethical claim: deception in service of care is not deception in the morally problematic sense. The court jester who made the king laugh while telling him he was being a tyrant was lying about the severity of the message to ensure the message was received. The lie is the price of admission to the spaces where direct speech would be rejected. The author knows this costs something — the Confession exists to name the cost plainly — and proceeds anyway.

Supplementary Note
Let No One Choose Your Reality

### The real argument

“LET NO ONE CHOOSE YOUR REALITY FOR YOU” is the sentence all four steps have been building toward. Steps One through Three are prerequisites: self-recognition, presence, and honest self-examination. They are preparation for the moment when someone tries to hand you their version of reality and you need to be able to evaluate it rather than simply accept it.

### The caps

The all-caps is not an accident of formatting. Across the archive, all-caps marks the moments where the author drops the jester mask long enough to make the unmediated statement. NOT READY (Step One), HERE;NOW (Step Two), PAY ATTENTION (Step Three), and then LET NO ONE CHOOSE YOUR REALITY FOR YOU. The escalating directness mirrors the steps themselves: by Step Four you are capable of receiving the direct instruction, because Steps One through Three prepared you for it.

### Read against the Trees

The Trees poem, three months later (October 2018), is the image of what happens when someone does choose your reality for you: a world without windows, with forbidden books, with optimised nutrition and logged sessions and the word “sunshine” known only from text. The vault is the failure mode of Step Four. The speaker’s jailbreak — the vents, the console, the blinding light — is what the 4 Steps process was building toward: the ability to locate a gate and go through it.

Supplementary Note
Healthy But Not Alive

### The anaphora as demolition

Four things society presents as goods: health, moral purity, wealth, perfection. Each offered and each found insufficient against a single criterion: alive. The repetition of “But not alive” is not rhetorical decoration — it is the method. By the fourth iteration, the reader has understood that the list can extend indefinitely. You could add educated, productive, safe, optimised. Each would fail the same test.

### What “alive” means

The poem doesn’t define it directly. It shows it: the light on the face like a breath of some great formless being. Skin scrunching in the warmth. Swimming shapes making solid forms. Squiggly angles and funny lines. Alive is not a measurable property. It is the opposite of the measurable properties the vault provides. You cannot log in to alive. You cannot clock its output. It has no metric. The vault can’t offer it because the vault can’t capture it, which means the vault can’t even name what it’s missing.

### The Steemit echo

The author posted this in October 2018 — one year after the Questions poem, which worried about whether Steemit posts had any value. The Questions poem’s anxiety was: am I doing nothing with the appearance of something? The Trees poem’s answer, from inside a vault where everyone is doing optimised nothing with the appearance of everything, is: the question was always the right one to ask. The vault is what you get when you stop asking it.