Ast was not satisfied with the amount of progress he had made on his poem, he knew that if he went home he would get distracted so he decided to go for a walk first, thinking some fresh air and a change in scenery might provide a reset of his thoughts. Around the block from his work was one of the few remaining parks in his city, this was where Ast used to spend many of his work breaks before falling into the habit of preferring the solitude of the ex smokers area in later years. Ast walked through this park as he tried to plan out his poem, his mind less than successful at staying focused due to all the stimuli diverting his attention.

He would see a little blue flower and suddenly be thinking about his first car without understanding the connection between the two, he would try to remember small details about that car, the music he listened to in it when he first got it, the fastest he went in it, how little he felt when he sold it, eventually giving up when he realised he was starting to think of memories that weren't his and were likely borrowed from some media or from a dream which he could no longer remember wasn't reality. A bird would fly over his head and he would tilt his head down incase it decided to try and poo on him, he would think about whether birds intentionally shat on people, he would think about the specifics of how someone could possibly test this empirically, how many data points would be needed to draw a statistically significant conclusion. I guess there would be some accidental correlation, birds would naturally fly over people more often than they didn't simply due to humans being something that caught their attention. He would pass a girl with a shaved head sitting on the ground with her hand in a boot, this would bring him back to the ever repeating cycle of thoughts about what poetry is to him that never really came to any conclusion.

Is this a poetic detail? surely a boot on your hand is nothing regular, there could be a very interesting story behind it. The problem is that it's too much of a conscious choice of hers and that it's too obvious for any external onlooker to see that it is out of place. It's easy to create or see things that are so blatantly out of place, it's not that interesting, what is interesting are those subtle details that take a trained eye, those details that reveal far more about someone than most could imagine and often times what someone is trying to hide, that's poetic. So why did she wear the boot? maybe she just wanted to look quirky and maybe it had no meaning, she was just fidgeting, her mind was elsewhere and her boots happened to be sitting nearby. You can still create an interesting backstory for why she was fidgeting though, like explain where her mind was? sure, but you can do that about anything, the specific of a boot on her hand isn't interesting on its own, you need to notice the small details, the shaved head is probably more interesting in terms of revealing something important about her even if it's more common.

Ast passed a long white feather on the ground having no idea what type of animal it came from, he decided that it wasn't a meaningful detail but that he would make it into one, he picked up the feather and stabbed the quill into the ground so it stood upright like a flag in a manner that could not happen realistically without human intervention.

He thought of how rare it must be for someone to do something like this intentionally due to its lack of utilitarian function. He thought it was poetic how it was likely nobody would ever notice this feather flag before it fell over through heavy rain, wind or contact with something. He thought this low chance of anyone noticing it made it even more poetic. He thought it was more poetic that even if someone did notice it, they might not even think about how it's not natural. He thought it was more poetic that even if they did notice that it wasn't natural they might not even care as to why someone would do such a thing 'people do things like this without reasons' they might conclude after half a thought and never consider it more deeply than that. He thought of this now infinitesimally small chance that someone would think about why someone would place a feather in the ground like so, he thought of why he did it.

This book is hosted on another platform. Read the official version and support the author's work.

To try and get people to notice the small details, to show people that there are other people out there who see meaning where it shows up hidden in the chaos of life, to show people there are other poetic souls out there who spend their efforts trying to show others something even if it is largely wasted or futile. So if someone does find it, they can know they are special, they succeeded in receiving the meaning despite the tiny odds and they saw meaning that likely no one else saw, and that in all likelihood may never have been seen.

Ast liked to imagine there were hundreds of other poetic souls in his neighbourhood, all living unseen and unrecognised for what they really are, never telling the nature of their inner thoughts to others, to take their deepest thoughts with them to their graves. Ast hoped his little action might inspire something in one of these souls and hoped that karma from giving someone else such a poetic detail would return back to him an equally poetic source of inspiration in time.

Ast spent the rest of his walk through the park thinking about how there seemed to be something very meaningful to him and perhaps even intrinsic in the idea that poetic details are often unseen by almost everyone, they need to be hidden in plain sight. He thought about how easy it was to artificially create something obviously out of place but how if it was obvious, it undermined the meaning, at least some of the meaning came in the hiding it or it being hidden due to its own nature. He thought about how poetry to him was fundamentally about exposing that hidden layer of meaning in everyday life, though tomorrow he would probably have a different opinion on what was fundamental to poetry, likely not entirely contradictory.

When Ast reached the other side of the park he sat down for a few minutes and thought about nothing of interest. He only did this as he was unsure if other people would notice that he walked somewhere only to instantly turn around and walk back, he didn't want to give strangers a reason to think about him, not just because he wanted to be hidden but also he felt it to be courteous to not disrupt their thoughts with his presence. He got up and walked back the exact same way he came, spending most of the walk trying to crunch the numbers surrounding just how unlikely it would be that someone would notice the feather and think about the motives of the person who planted it there and come to the right conclusion that it was planted there exactly for that reason, just to inspire someone to think about this. He came to the conclusion that it was roughly 1 in 200 thousand.

As he left the park and stopped at the crossing for the light, a schoolgirl stood beside him, he briefly looked over at her to do a quick calculation for the ratio between the volume of her backpack and her when another girl ran up behind her, grabbed her on her shoulders and playfully jolted her backwards gently. He thought about how long it had been since anyone had playfully and innocently touched him and wondered if his experience was rare or if it was normal for this to be something reserved for kids, something that gradually ended and died off after adolescence without ever asking to be excused. He returned to work, looked up at his bosses window but couldn't see anything through the dark tint, got in his car and drove home.