Business in the Middle Age
Sometimes people live half their lives
To realize that they had never been living at all,
Only catering to the expectations of others,
And for what? —
Many of them begin to wonder.
When there was sunshine in their life,
They tended to ignore the light spilling over the dawn,
Focusing instead on the dusk of their intuition,
Teaching their eyes to callous
On illumination,
So the world in darkness is more visible.
Blindness comes to all that seek it.
Some of them sit in an endless continuum,
Recycling the same modicums of waste
They've perpetuated,
Fueled by a steady stream
Of Arabica bean coffee—
In cups the size of two stomachs—
And instantaneously prepared
Yuppie fast-food—
The kind that promotes how it supplies ‘the third world, '
Offering the people they oppress
(in order to receive what they make)
A sufficient cache
Of obviously inferior product.
Their thoughts rattle like coins in a slot machine,
Eventually slurring in the casino landscape that surrounds them.
When that vertigo appears—
The kind that suggests to them that they are doing nothing,
But feeding into the innocuous process
Of working for no reason other than to ensure their job exists—
They work harder,
Or sit down harder
To stare at the spreadsheets harder
To gaze at the numbers harder
To see the white space behind them harder
Wishing life weren't any harder.
That's when they finally know,
When they finally realize,
That they've spent all of their time stockpiling money,
Hoarding their cash away,
Building a tower of furniture,
Of automobiles,
Of internet opportunities,
Of stomach ulcers,
[...] Read more
poem by Tim Stensloff
Added by Poetry Lover
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