The Factory
Your tarnished grey paint on a rotting wood canvas.
This melancholy greeting from an entrance to exploitation.
Why I keep meeting you in that gloomy terrain,
Why I trudge through rain and grime to slave for you,
Is all but unintelligible jargon, for you are but a machine.
I arrive in the oily blackness at your unhealthy cavern,
Imprisoned till my heart runs out of beats,
Even though your piston will never.
No breathing soul or pitying heart surveys,
Only the hard steel, boasting well worn buttons in braille.
You burn with energy but you have no enthusiasm,
Just as you churn with rhythmic clatter but have no voice.
This leaching sling reveals workers through its jagged cracks.
Workers rid of emotion yet brimming with mechanical speed.
That is all the seething metal needs to pump,
It runs on sweat, not tears.
I have worshiped you many years.
Cowering before your powerful surges
That resonate through our skin.
You have us transfixed in a state of spasm.
Unable to grasp the air beyond those doors,
To feel its caress pour through our outspread arms.
A wave of tension suffocated by your demanding clutch.
Never easing, never ceasing, the bewitchment of a machine.
The Organic running the mechanic.
Yet seemingly visa versa.
Hollow light level-pegging artificially spun air.
No comfort behind those glistening bottles,
Only fatigued bodies and malnourished minds.
Orders to be processed, deadlines to obey.
The only way to put caviar on the boss' table.
The only way to exploit the hardworking uneducated.
Your globalized steel shimmers in unicin,
Yet its face shows pressured individuals
Withering behind masks of rhythmic production.
Will there be a resolution?
Only if the world stops turning.
Copyright © Katherine Livingstone | Year Posted 2006
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