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The alarm goes off at six and drags me out
like a piece of meat from the cooler.
My body doesn’t wake as much as startles.
It was still down there in the dark animal heat,
dreaming in its own dumb tongue,
and now it’s shoved into the cold scheduled hours,
the same old shift that eats your life alive.
I ride the elevator to the twenty-third floor
with the others, humans who don’t talk much anymore.
Some guy in a clean shirt points at a graph on the screen
and everybody nods.
The lines mean somebody somewhere is going to have less.
Less time, less pension, less life.
The windows don’t open.
They never did.
If they did, too many of us would step out into the long silence.
All that glass just holds the same dead air we breathe,
a sealed photo of air.
The spreadsheet doesn’t know shit about mitochondria
or the green blood moving through the trees.
It only wants the numbers to line up,
the electrons to march,
my body to give all that it has left
and call it data.
It doesn’t care that you’re mostly water and old starlight,
same as the dirt under the parking lot,
same as the black mouth waiting at the fresh grave.
By eight PM I’m home again,
used up, nothing left to say.
Sleep doesn’t fix it.
I feel stalled just like a river is tired
when dammed so long
it forgets it was ever moving,
running, splashing around.
Something old in my chest keeps asking:
Where are the others?
Where’s the fire?
Why aren’t we sitting together
watching something real burn down into the night?
We were never built for this,
for the sealed towers and the glowing numbers
that chew through everything we came from.
We were built for weather on the face,
for hunger that meant something,
for walking home through real dark
with the smell of cut grass or rain or bread.
We knew every face around the fire once.
Now we know the app names on blue light screen.
Tonight I lay on the grass outside, near a shocked ant
just to feel something that isn’t moving at market speed.
The earth is still down there, patient as bone,
breathing with me into the sky.
I keep living in the narrow space between shifts,
an animal pending inside its body
waiting for the day they all agree
I am free to go die.
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Hi, I’m Nicole. You can read here a bit about myself!
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For almost all of my life I have been out of the office and on the road. First eight years I worked at an airport, ramp agent, ops manager and pilot. Then seven years with an airline. As a manager or a sales rep for the next forty-five years I always putting 35,000 per year on my car. The few years that I spent entirely in the office almost killed me. Road warriors live longer.
Powerful, striking, and sad, yet the language and metaphors sing. SO relatable.