One side of an imagined conversation [ballad]

I tend toward a crisis mentality
  (remarked the merry minstrel on his cell)
does crisis demonstrate conventionality?
  chaotic quest in search of all-is-well?

while crisis can foreclose creative thinking
  a bunkered mode of fatalistic fear
it equally might push the mind   all blinking
  toward novel ways that land one in the clear

but anyway (he added) how are you?
  I hear you plan to travel in the fall
it's critical I think that you should do
  some fresh report to entertain us all

my eyes are peeled to see (he thus concluded)
  whatever you discover in the yonder
in life   the depth of life remains occluded
  on this account   we minstrels love to ponder