This poem is about not moving in lockstep and about thinking for yourself. It's also reminiscent of "the force" in Star Wars - you let yourself be guided to the truth by a kind of free flow. The poem didn't start that way, it was initially an experiment intended to be more about sound of words and mood. I woke up with the phrase "soul river" in my mind, and then told a LLM to make a poem just based on the title. I was astonished by what it put out. Then I asked myself - "what does this song mean?" I kept changing and changing it until it meant something. It was like starting with a scaffolding, and then replacing every brick. Poetrysoup doesn't want poems created by A.I. but I think in this case it was OK; because I was finding a 'starting point', like taking a set of photos and making a painting out of it. I tried PoetrySoup's checker for A.I generated poems, and it says this poem was generated by a human. And apart from a few phrases (like 'silent night'), it is.
