Eight hours everyday five days of the week.

Come home, eat dinner go to sleep and have a weekend break.

Wasting time or time gone wasted? Pay the mortgage if I had one to pay. Pay the bills and send the kids all off to college.

That's what management says. "You millennials, always ruining something!"

You can't feed a family on avocado toast seasoned with debt.

Is it worth it? This life I have? These four-walls are a cell and I'm paid to be locked in a for-profit prison. Eight hours everyday five days out of the week.

Food and sleep are a punctuation. Sunlight through a dusty office window and stale break room coffee.

Blink and you're forty. Blink again and you realize that you can't get back the hours you spent on overtime. Glazed-eyes and a faded smile.

"If you don't like it, quit." I would if I could, but I like to have a roof over my head and hot food in the wintertime.

I'll retire when I die.

At least I know that my kids won't have to pay for my coffin.

The Bachelor has his suit; pressed and clean. Heart as heavy as the briefcase he carries. Dreaming of a life far removed from the train, from the city and the state he's debt-bound to.

The Nurse has his scrubs; spit-stained and wrinkled. Hands chapped and nimble. Caring for his child-patients who wouldn't live to see next Christmas...or next week.

The Student has her laptop; stickers and plastic. A stomach full of off-brand rice and noodles. Bound to the daily grind, text-book burdened and a future blanketed in grey walls and alcohol.

The Soldier has his uniform.

The Anarchist has her mask.

The Writer has her pen.

The Faithful have a God.

The Children have their dreams.

We each have our own armor, and it is never as comfortable as it looks.

To live a life in perspective
I’m told you need to define a horizon
line eye level to the viewer.

From my hill of years the view is fluid
as in watery, but also as in unpredictable.

On the sea’s face a wall of fog moves in
and out like histories remembered
and forgotten.

Sometimes silver striates the sea
with such a glitter of insight
I am bedazzled and cannot look.

Sometimes fogbank and ocean merge
with such blue-gray unity it seems
the horizon rises so that I stand on
the shore, dwarfed by a surf of knowledge
that pounds at my ignorance.

Sometimes the sea becomes invisible,
the white air a questioning emptiness,
a finger-touch of damp against the cheek.

I imagine you
in the slot canyons of valhalla
among rattlesnakes and bighorns
at twilight

I imagine you
running through knee-deep snowdrifts
with icecicles forming on your beard
under a full moon

I imagine you
living after dying,
and it's so hard
to imagine anything else

But you can't move anymore
and if there is a valhalla
no one ever deserved a place in it
like you did-
but that's a fiction

it's my imagination

it's my cowardice
and my inability to accept that anyone
as alive as you could be dead.

You're a nothing now
and the truth is I imagine you alive
because it is so much better
to be a something than a nothing-

which I think you knew all along.

O secret voice of hidden love!
O bleating without wool! O wound!
O dry camellia, bitter needle!
O sea-less current, wall-less city!

O night immense with sharpened profile,
heavenly mountain, narrow valley!
O dig inside the heart, voice going,
endless silence, full-blown iris!

Let me be, hot voice of icebergs,
and do nto ask me to vanish
in weeds, where sky and flesh are fruitless.

Leave my hard ivory skull forever,
have pity on me. Stop the torture!
O I am loev, O I am nature!

I write along the walls of my mind.

I'm going insane? I don't know. Why?

Depression grips tight in a strangling hold.

I'd rather die young than see me get old.

Working my bones eight hours a day;
far too much stress for too little pay.

Real life doesn't rhyme or ebb or flow.

Work never stops and the clock goes tick-tock.

I'll look in the mirror, what do I see?

Old eyes. Sun-scarred misery.

I've got nothing to show for myself. Sure, there are some diplomas up on a shelf—

And far too many stories I have yet to think about:

Get them out of my brain and onto the page; I'll fall into a rage sooner or later.

These thoughts of violence and nonsensical anxieties race around and around in my head. A wheel that never stops. Oh, pure OCD.

Pure. A shot of water that I swallow down and pretend that it's *****.

No, mother, I'm not alright and it's about time that you stop telling me to try harder.

I can't pull my bootstraps up any higher or else I may strangle myself with them!

This is my last breath before drowning.

Oh, dear friend, if I don't find my salvation soon, I'll hit the bottom of the swimming pool.

I make me crazy, and I was never taught how to swim.