What is My Career Plan? (a poetic conversation between selves and shadows) #poetry

You ask me,
boldly,
like the world isn't burning,
like maps aren't folding into origami cranes
fleeing a war we never declared.

You sit there in your buttoned-up resume,
ticking off verbs like "implemented" and "streamlined",
as if the heart has job descriptions,
as if ambition comes with a blueprint.

Career plan?
Is that the question you ask
or the box you want me to shrink into?
Do you want my soul in bullet points,
my fire doused in quarterly goals?

Let me tell you what I told the mirror this morning:

I plan to dance in libraries and
scream into spreadsheets.
To file dreams alphabetically—
A for anarchist,
B for barefoot,
C for catastrophe curator.

I will not climb your ladder
(it looks too much like a gallows in disguise).
Instead, I’ll grow sideways
like ivy on abandoned chapels,
rewriting the holy text in invisible ink.


---

You, yes you—reading this in cubicle glare—
What did you want to be before “practicality” kissed you on the forehead goodnight?
Remember the dirt-smeared hands that built castles?
The astronaut suits stitched from bed sheets?

Your career plan was once to be a thunderstorm.
But someone sold you a tie
and called it the sky.


---

Plan A:
Become a cloud.
Vanish and reappear,
and never explain the rain.

Plan B:
Run a teashop on the moon
for poets too tired to rhyme.

Plan C:
Be a librarian of lost dreams—
stamp each with “borrowed time,”
no late fees for those who return
only as whispers.


---

Sometimes I envy the ants.
They never need career counseling.
Their path is baked into the soil,
a legacy of footprints.
But I?
I was born with questions instead of answers,
with a heart that beats in Morse code,
asking always—what now, what next?


---

Once I tried to build a plan.
Printed it on starched paper,
framed it in oak,
and watched as the wind
used it to pick its teeth.


---

And what if the plan is to unplan?
To fail spectacularly
like a firework that writes “oops” in the sky?
To love jobs like lovers—
fiercely, briefly,
then part before bitterness spoils the goodbye?


---

You’re still waiting for my answer.
You want credentials, a timeline, a pitch.
You want a five-year plan.
Fine.
Here it is:

Year One:
Unlearn obedience.
Learn to say “no” with poetry.

Year Two:
Collect silence.
Bottle it.
Sell it as a remedy for meetings.

Year Three:
Invent a new job:
Cloud Reader.
Pay: inconsistent.
Joy: immeasurable.

Year Four:
Start a revolution in a spreadsheet,
hide haikus in the footnotes.

Year Five:
Disappear,
leaving only a trail of post-it notes that say:
“You are more than your job title.”


---

There are days I want to be a beekeeper.
Not for the honey,
but for the buzzing chaos
that mirrors my thoughts.

Other days I want to dig graves
not for bodies,
but for all the resumes
that never dared to dream.


---

You, dear questioner,
do you even know your own career plan?
Or are you echoing the inquiry
because silence scares you more than uncertainty?

Perhaps your plan was to ask mine
to avoid asking your own.


---

I once met a woman
who said her career was
“to make strangers cry beautifully.”
She played violin in subways,
smiling at the echoes.

I asked her if it paid well.
She shrugged and said,
“It pays in returned glances
and unspoken apologies.”


---

So what is my career plan?
To be an echo in the halls of meaning,
to be remembered not by title
but by the warmth left in a room.

To be a question,
not an answer.

To be a verb,
not a noun.

To be the pause
between two exclamation marks.


---

And you,
reader,
listener,
struggler of salary slips and "what nexts"—
here’s your permission slip:
You are not late.
You are not lost.
You are lava reshaping land.

Tear your plan if you must.
Draw dragons in the margins.
Write your CV in myth.
List “dragon-slayer” under skills.
List “wound-licker” under experience.
And under goals, write:
“To burn, to bloom, to bewilder.”


---

Now ask again—what is my career plan?
I’ll answer with a laugh
and a matchstick.
Then watch the sky,
and wait for the smoke to form
my next impossible dream.