The silent white walls thrum beneath the lights,
Stark as the tundra, where our barren eyes
See naught but time that drips and dries away,
Evaporating high to ducted heavens.
The click-cacophony retrains the ears
To feel the pulse of progress growing fast,
Urging the fingers bled at shrines aloft;
Raised high to frame humanity yet hung
With unbelievers clouding codes of saints.
Our crumbl’ng facades of shoe-shined niceties
Hold out until the even’ng, when our hearts
Aching for soul-sincerity curse the walls
That still surround our stagnant bones,
And, high above, the stars in shielding smog
Struggle to bend perception’s stubborn gaze
That sees no further than the clock than spells
The hours, the days, the weeks, the months, the years
In servitude unending to the will
Of nothingness incorporated, voids
Absorbing faith and conscience, piece by piece,
Until fair weather cannot clear the clouds
That calcified across our stilted vision
As cataracts obscuring fire or frost
Or rain in stinging showers - just the white
On grey on black; all colours having fled
To plague the happy hearth of those that see
With still-young eyes, cuckolding us from life
That myth made manifest within a dream,
American, Australian or even Greek -
For Christ's sake, it’s all the same when death
Awaits in swaddle clothes for our return.
And when the lies we bought again ‘n again,
Return in echoed whispers to assuage
The coarse abrasion age has welcomed in,
Like plots vampiric, giving death no chance
To free us from the bitter wastrel’s grasp,
E’er cutting, cursing, whimpering and jilting,
We scream into magnificence and hear
Our voice escape to better worlds beyond
The sick horizon’s hazy oriflamme,
Calling us on to battle, death, Valhalla.
In ancient times I’d be a hunter, maybe.
In medieval 'haps a benedictine
(Disgracing his confessor, graced with doubt).
In early-modern born a humble cobbler
Proud of his trade, just as his father did.
Yet now, within this beat, I have no purpose,
Except to lodge a panoply of gripes
With HR, Earth or Heav'n, still peopling steady
Into oblivions of silent white.

*Dedicated to my tedious, soul-crushing corporate job. Only 30 years until retirement 🥳