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I'm Major Jackson and this is the Slowdown at certain times of the year I get an itch. A fantasy, really. I want to get off the grid. I long to find my way to the middle of nowhere, a stopgap between modern life and me. I wish for a place where the tyranny of emails, deadlines and news feeds has less sway. I wish to join the hundreds of thousands of Americans who live impartial to full isolation. So I binged YouTube videos of couples converting cabins of younger people building tiny houses on glittering lakes in the middle of a forest. Living sustainably has something to do with it, but lately it is more a need for distance so that I can get a fix on the world. Nothing like tapping one's inner Thoreau to renew one's belief in the human enterprise. Today's poem critiques the relentless psychic demands of an inscrutable world, yet too encourages a sideways road to tranquility, a way that we might secure a meaningful freedom. Ennui By Louise G. Datto I slept in the frenzy and delirium of men and their cities, close by the streets, in the crossways of traffic, deep in the waste of houses where multitudes unsmiling are homeless molded the hut of my life care deserted of a haven of slumber and open eyed sleep of peace for my soul to the world and its whirling of men in disorder to the riot of manifold unvaried activities, from the pain of birth to the pleasure of death. I lived not I slept for the peace of my soul. Ears I had but I heard not the clamor of bells from churches and towers of stone. I heard not the clink of metal, the groaning of iron with the weight of passengers and wheels of iron, the whistle from long throated chimneys, the siren of sound and smoke from the piers to the clanking of steel, to the hissing of vapor from pent up boilers in the shops, on the street, in the ships on the stream, to the thud of machines against factory walls and of trucks on the adamant road in the open, to the motley newsboys streaking and the rabble of crowds on the street, on the square, in the rush of commotion and fury, to the sounds discordant, erratic, out of tune, cadence less out of time. I was rot, unresponsive, a alien remote. They were silence and echoes, sepulchral of silence in tombs, life that stirred from the vitals of creatures howling and wakeful in graves, death that returned with the ebb and recession of life. Refusing love, these to me meant nothing when confusion was all they could mean. Love that was hatred merely hatred begotten of love, unrequited pity, self seeking, self centered, selfish friendship of hearts that were hollow, of feeling, passions let loose and cravings run wild. These were the forces of fire and power, titanic, oppressing the flesh of a spirit rebuke rebellious for freedom, of pleasure, for freedom from pain. I slept forgetful of self, unconcerned about others, living for their own in a half mad world of desire, unmindful, forgetting care and canker and chaos. I slept with Endymion, loved of the moon, perpetual in the wilderness of cities, in the wasteland of war. The Slowdown is a production of American Public Media in partnership with the Poetry Foundation. This project is also supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts. On the web@arts.gov to get a poem delivered to you daily, go to slowdownshow.org and sign up for our newsletter and find us on Instagram at Slowdown Show.