8. Poetry by Matt Schumacher
Art by Paulo Sayeg | Caaard Moscou Z
Manifesto
If you have built castles in the air,
that is where they should be.
Now build the foundations under them.
–Thoreau
This poem aims to be an unashamed crusader for forsaken dreams.
“Give your dreams some air, ladies and gentlemen!” it demands.
Let your dreams out for a while! Your dreams deserve fair treatment.
If you’re moved to, construct castles to give them air.
If your dreams are made of liquid, you are lucky!
If they are solid, you are equally as lucky!
Let your dreams be your real sea, your real earthships.
If they’re labyrinthine, walk through them carefully,
as they may reveal minotaurs who share secrets.
If they are mazes which spin and pinwheel to great heights,
your dreams may yet braze your horizon.
Lost your dreams for a while? I prescribe and administer
a spoonful of Buckminster’s Dymaxion yearnings for countrysides
that don’t yet exist, gleaming dream homes shaped like flying saucers,
affordable for solar punks, simplified for luddites,
dynamically built, powering themselves with moveable parts.
Imagine them, solar-paneled, self-sustainable, mayhaps, with a few tweaks,
also capable of flight. If your dreams seem too juvenile,
may they awaken to the day like caves of Lascaux and Chauvet,
painted with mammoths and cave bears, replete with ancient mystical ritual.
Visitors to your dreams may then say they feel haunted,
as if they’re interrupting work 30,000 years old!
Take heart, readers. Work’s needed to render dreams real.
Where are our temporary autonomous zones? Our fantastical tool libraries?
The streetcorners where everyone’s instilled with possibilities?
Where are our borderless countries and situationist cities?
But we’re capable beings. Consider the tallest wooden skyscraper in the world,
recently built by a gangster, in Russia. Or the Forevertron,
where munitions became a time-traveling theoretical spaceship, near Baraboo.
Nek Chand’s sculpture garden. Cheval’s Palais Ideal.
Gillette’s Metropolis and I desired America as a wilderness.
Unloose your dreams and feel the hypothetical wonder of his honeycombed city.
Matt Schumacher
Matt Schumacher, who would very much enjoy a joyride in a flying saucer, edits the journal Phantom Drift and lives near a Paul Bunyan statue in Portland, Oregon. His sixth poetry collection, A Missing Suspiria de Profundis, was published by Greying Ghost Press in 2019.