Now let me get this straight, I’m supposed to want what you’ve got? Ain’t no wagon big enough to hold all the worldly possessions you offer, the shine and pop glittering off your leadbolten chains sunk and anchored deep in the molten core of the earth. No offense, friend, but I’m aiming to travel a little lighter than that.
Everything I own is packed up here, ready to go wherever life is still fragile and not yet covered with concrete and steel. Boxes of unsettled memories, most of them mine, some of them borrowed, but that’s just fine. I trade them on the roadside to strangers and friends alike just to feed my family. I got kids that call me Pa and a wife that loves me true and a newborn baby with eyes so blue they make the ocean cry even when the sun is shining, so it don’t bother me none that my tarp’s been leaking and my lung’s been rattling. You call me poor, but I am rich. Richer than you anyway. Your mountain of worthless money can’t buy what life has given me freely.
And you still say I’m supposed to want what you’ve got? You step out from behind your polished black veneer of tinted glass to hurl spit and fire at me, threatening with scorn that I should dream your dreams for you? You wonder why I stand unmoved as you command me to sign the dotted line and exchange what I’ve got for your drunken dream? A cup of clean water for your barrel of poisoned wine?
Your dreams are nothing to me. I am the undreamed, my friend, and your stillborn dream will be left on the road unmourned where it will be trampled by the masses you dreamt of trampling. And as for me, when all the words have been spoke and all the dreams undreamt, I’ll ignore my leaking tarps and my own rattling lung just long enough to smile on my kids and hold my wife close and jump in to the cleansing ocean of my baby’s eyes one more time before I have to travel even more lightly on.