“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.

“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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.