We

We wake in the morning, or at noon, or the witching hour, rising, sick, or sleepy, or hurried.

We make our preparations and take our medications, black coffee, nicotine, whiskey rocks, what have you, running and walking dogs, herding children and scooping after cats. There is no tomorrow, only this synthetic ‘morning’, whatever hour it may be

We rocket out into the night, frozen or pouring, sunny or black and befogged, gripping the wheel blasting tunes or news, turning them up and down. Red. Green. Red. Green. Yellow. Red. Turn. For the time clock, like the airplane, they wait for no man, no woman

Punch in, punch out; as the weary depart; you are alert on the headset; she is shifting packages among conveyors, up, down, across slides the latte. Clinkety clink go the coins and rustle of crumpled ones, out of pockets and into tip jars. Brake, stop, go, the drive thru, the sausage biscuits. The scrubs and IVs and X-Rays

Shaking off the angst and trouble, walking out into the pre-dawn, the half mile, even in your weakness, the day’s first six pack, the day’s first hit of whatever — returning, did we sleep? 6 minutes or 5 hours? Who knocked over all these things? Counting up the remnants of the checking accounts, the coat pockets, couch cushions. What remains to pawn? How shall we sleep at the end? Piecing energy and normalcy back together, calorie by coffee by catnap by nightmare, by vitamins and meds —– —–

Falling asleep at the desk; a streaming river of people head to the coffee and food machines; streaming back out, like so many worker ants, picking out all your packets of stuff from Amazon, we rush through cigarettes, and walk 20 miles in a day

We falter. It is all too much. We rage at the news. Some of us profess not to vote, that they’re all the same and none of it matters. Some of us shake our heads, incomprehending how they got like that. But of course we know! At least in part. The messages are pumped out by the billions a day. Some are served by this depoliticization. Not to say that it’s all controlled. No, certainly not… We swipe left. We swipe right. We key in impulsive thoughts. We key them with utmost care. We scream into the void and it screams back indifference, or threats, or adulation

We check the analytics on our ads, putting in some final tweaks and tidying up. We punch out. We walk out. We head to parking garages or buses, we white knuckle umbrellas in the howling winds. We go creepy crawling, stop and going, here and there, itching to escape the mob of traffic escaping the downtown, or the fulfillment center, or the hospital, or the strip mall. We look forward to our few brief hours of comfort. We settle in, with martinis, with tv shows, with both, with neither. We struggle, fretting about ambitions that never seem to be plausible, or we struggle working on them. We head to writers’ groups, libraries, bars, houseless shelters, even tents. We make ready for midnight. We begin again.

We begin again.
We begin.
Again.

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Featured image source material by me made using DALL-E 2 with prompts for “tv fog rat race” and “synthetic morning clock punch hurry”

If you clicked on an ad to get here, photo sources for the WordPress.com advertisement were Maria Teneva on Unsplash and Tiard Schulz on Unsplash.

Also, see related protagonists We All the Small Ones and We the People [citation needed]

I do hope that brightened your day (or darkest night, as the case may be and if not it was fluorescent)! If you are struggling, here is a song: Your Heart is a Muscle the Size of Your Fist and another: A Better Son/Daughter