Workers' Poem (1): Brave, New, Amnesiac World

October 2024:

We flip to an empty page as your emptiness fails to flip

The switch of our minds, dragging, droning, drowning,

Pulses burning, electrocuting, demanding us to stay behind.

Your 16-hour production target, checkbox unchecked every time.

Until our hearts turn, until our heads and the walls turn,

And turn the bleak sky and the black fly and the blurred lights too.

Turn the turning wheels and widening gyre in our minds too.

Turn the turning threads that twine around and knit buttons in lines. Flip

The piece of fabric and dip it in organic dye, turn

The corpses of murdered trees and hopeful flowers to life dying, drowning.

Make green the new black, turn everything green and growing with time:

Profit, not Trees. Goals, not Acts. Stories, not Lives, tied on lines behind.

Suffocating, we flounder in heavy metals’ nuclei. Tied behind,

We purchase coins with life: consented contract, voluntary exchange too

dollars per 60 minutes of life. The mechanical second hand whipping, rushing time.

That’s 1 in every 30, one-third in every 10, one thirty-millionth flips

In every one of the thirty million of us who live and die, not waving but drowning

At every turn of our life, as turning machines turn itself into weavers turning.

Crispy glasses with burning wind, winding together data, parameters turning

A wall behind

Another wall. A world beyond another world. A black shoe drowning

A foot too.

Two flips of fried potatoes for your lunch flairs your skin with flips that flip

A time.

Shuffle your feet and race towards empty dreams, record time taken five times

On another road turning

On a road. Another strait spiraling on a strait. Another page flipping

On a page behind

The script of life written in shadows for you to memorize too:

On Drowning.

We breathe something heavier than carbon dioxide, drowning

The count of the countless times our dreams deferred, not erased by times:

Our hands handling, our hearts hoarding, our dreams dreaming, or you two too.

Legacies worth keeping. Stories worth telling. Things worth saying. Turning

Wishes into dandelions that wish to be set free from the skulls of empty minds behind

The walk of shame, the recounts of crimes, the shrine of lies they keep flipping.

We speak, smile, shout, shroud—anger by anger, stone by stone—an amnesiac dynasty’s time.

You can’t lie to us,

Because we don’t lie.