When you rise, you already know:  
The lab waits, stale and still.  
Same floor, dirt, same click of keys—  
A day measured in dust, not thrill.

Forty hours, earned and owed.  
The hands of clocks don’t tick—they tap.  
Each second held like lab samples—  
Precise, but hollow, neatly stacked.  
You know the price.  
Wear your coat, neat and white.  
Glasses on, hair tied tight.

I check the time,  
Just to be met with nothing new.  
Lunch breaks stretch—too slow, too long—  
Like the day itself drains the soul.

That awful smell,  
Heating samples to a hiss.  
The heat rolls out—  
Burns your limbs, once blissfully unaware.

You finish early. Precision wins—  
But time is a master, not a guide.  
They won't send you home for clarity—  
They only need your hours, not your pride.

The dirt beneath the microscope  
Is cleaner than this worn routine.  
What once was physics, full of light,  
Now quantifies what might have been.

You didn’t light my passion—  
I burned it to the ground.  
Taught me nothing new,  
Expanded only knowledge of life:  
Forty hours a week—  
A dead-end job.

You know the steps before you move.  
Your badge, your desk, your shift, your face.  
You could draw it blind, dream it still—  
Each breath a brace for empty space.

You cry on days you can't explain.  
Too much knowing breaks the soul.  
Routine is a cruel scientist—  
It tests your limits. Marks its toll.

But still, you rise. And still, you go—  
Not for the thrill, but for control.  
If chaos is the only other path,  
Then monotony feels like parole.

I left the lab, but left much more.  
A spark once lit by force and flight  
Now physics haunts, not holds me close—  
A love I lost to measured light.  
Not every passion finds its path,  
But some still shine from deep within.

You asked:
"How you came to your dead end?"

How did I?
Perhaps too much of chasing butterflies,
or maybe running barefoot in hot, avid pursuit
of those looping, berserk kites

adrift like airborne serpents

in delirious evening skies.

Then there were those chimeric rainbows -
sedately fantastic illusions of dream jobs,
and loving homes with ambrosial glows.

They all eventually led to the same prosaic end,
for, any-which-way, all roads wound up
at appropriately conventional
and consequently beaten bend.

Till the chase went on, it was the same old story -
All fulfilled ambition promptly subject to
increasingly falling marginal utility.

After all of it was said and done,
every little crown lost and won,
the agony of the question still remained
no last words arose,
to which to exclaim and say Yay!

Life had me in its hook. See:?
while this is what it meant to be free: !

✽

Fossilized in my den, I stared wistfully
at life's irrevocable loose ends
and this is how my friend
I arrived at my proverbial dead ends.

a dead-end job or as a boss
doesn't matter
better than to
sit at home
thinking about
what to work on

On the day that I lost my name
I took a nice long walk
To the edge of infinity,
Searching for it

You know, they say the earth is round
And as I leaned to peer over the side of it
There, lay a vast blanket of outer space
No continuous ground— like they said
No path to move on from
Dead-end roads  and deadened feet
Had led me to this edge, where
I cut myself on contemplative thorns

“At what point did he stop loving me?”
“My friends are gone”
“Rehab couldn’t fix me”
“I don’t want to wake up tomorrow”

No, the world isn’t round
My thoughts are round
And so are my vices
Always spinning and falling
Into a perpetual mental cycle

So when I looked beyond the cliffs of my flat Earth
Into the depths of nothingness
I pondered what it would feel like

To
      tippy
                 toe
                         my way over

                  To lose myself forever

If I never wake up tomorrow
Would they remember my name?