To where would you run
if, by chance, you drew
from the deck of unknown fates
a card of great mercy
and were thereupon released, untethered
from the pendulum of drudgery

Where would you flee to
dashing madly on raw feet
ecstatic, disbelieving
in the fate you by chance chose

Have you a secret destination
a guarded sanctum of some kind
which, by years of yearning
has been wrought real
from the imagination of your mind?

Or would you stagger across the sand
in no direction at all
as though an absinthe drunk
a foreigner to the absence of routine
tracing, retracing
oblong, ponderous, vaguely circular orbits
lost, hopeless
without the stricture of obligatory employment
against which to rail and complain