I am thinking — with tools and levers of life's dynamo — I'll build myself an engine. Its inner workings will comprise the most unlikely components (which I spy with a tinkerer's eye) found abandoned, along the roadsides of forgotten places. Here, I ought to write a note down to bring along a sack of burlap for collection purposes. Otherwise, I'll surely forget, and the components will grow ever more wan and thin until they vanish out of the world. To incorporate the rusted beyond repair, I reduce with my consciousness the scrap, removing with blue thought all oxygen.

Sprigs of comely herbs have shot up where stones sought to block spring's chaotic way; I will take them as helpmates in the creation process of my mad machine. Like me, their capabilities sit quiet, waiting to be discovered by outcasts that wander wild places.

Suddenly it occurs to me how strange it is to view rain as an interloper, and not an amplification of a basic condition inherent to livable spaces, a corporealizing of vital humidity. Bodies of water are always airborne to the one whose vision extends to the microscopic. I jot that down, also, in my inventor's notebook, though unsure as to its usefulness in any practical venture.

So, yes, carbon-based, laced with silicon, a hybrid of sorts — a machine to compute the incomputable. All the alloys known to man are in a table of nutritional information on the backside of the universe's chip-packet. I turn it slowly over in my sleep and patiently go down the list, riding in the back of a chariot that soars or floats on Lethe's moonstreams.

Of course, then, also — not only retractable claws and opposable digits on all limbs — wings are necessary for what I must build. Scales? Fur? Soft skin? ...Or all three? Perhaps it is best to include various defensive options to my creations. Though, the transmutive tissues needed for such capabilities, hmmm, very energy-inefficient... Ah, but now, I am too carried away thinking about the container, forgetting to contemplate what it must contain.

Schematics bloom into my vision, written in starry precision across the too-bright sky. Staring at the palm of my hand, I fail to receive their intuitive nudge, and the back of the book is glued shut by that same vital humidity I noted several lifetimes of thought back, which also plays upon the grooves of my fingerprints.

And now, it weaves also a cloudy veil. Under that cloudy veil, still aloft in some unfamiliar firmament, I have come back to the beginning of the curriculum. I am faced with empty worksheets, and the prompts are all written in an unfamiliar language I must learn before I can even begin. Daunted by the work ahead, I can't help but feel I am neglecting something terribly important, far more important than this drudgery. Ah, I was building something — I'm sure of it — that's all I can recall.