T﻿his 10-minute flash poem is part of the NY Poetry Society's winter intensive. I wrote this as part of an exercise in Week 4 (Divinations & Archetypes), a poem inspired by using a book and 

“Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World”

"At the cleaners I claimed a jacket and two shirts; at the stationery shop I purchased a pen, envelopes, and letter paper; at the hardware store, the finest-grain whetstone in the place."

people told me that a picture-perfect life

would involve striking flashes of excitement

it wasn't until i tried living the opposite way

where everything is stripped off, stripped away

          the years flow just like a sheet of snow

like a flock of swallows that finished migration

here i am at my favourite stationery shop