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Nosy Jul 7
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.
What killed my love for physics.
Just Grace Sep 2020
I felt it then
like I feel it now

There was a dead end sign
at that moment I peered into our future

We tried to give space
Then that choice was taken away
One more chance to prove we can survive
locked down together

So we took my family land
We tilled that soil
Built distractions
Illusions and dreams

The peppers and tomatoes
that I now harvest
I prepare them alone
The nightshades
the itch
now taint my tears
and pink-stain my cheeks
where they have streamed
Chandra S Nov 2019
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.
Inspired by the question in a poem by Inner Incognito at https://poetizer.com/poem/555814

WELCOME

Sad you are?
Join the club!
I think you'll find there's plenty of

like headed minds and wandered souls
On the path to pay the toll
But like all paths we're headed down
If stayed the course you'll come around
So pick a seat and tell us friend

How you came to your dead end.

© Inner Incognito, 2019
emru Oct 2019
a dead-end job or as a boss
doesn't matter
better than to
sit at home
thinking about
what to work on
Aashutosh Shahi Jan 2019
We go on through many curves,
But keep moving on, Is in my nerves;
I never stop looking for something,
I may even end with a ding!
My destiny is prewritten,
And it can never be rewritten;
I pray that love which I share today and tomorrow,
May even mean more to you without any sorrow;
I am used to obstacles in my way,
But they can't be ignored everyday;
Some obstacles teach me how to survive,
While others help me in coming up high;
I learned that the person who treats everybody nice,
Usually ends up treated like a MICE;
Some people can't understand what it takes to put this fake smile up,
But they just care about their coffee cup;
It's fine it'll soon come to an end,
I guess I have to lie this till my dead-end.
:)
Delia Darling Jul 2018
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?
Diána Bósa Apr 2018
Rumor has it one takes pictures of stuff
that one is afraid of losing.

The girl who captures moments with her camera
seeking the company of entangled dwellings
beneath the womb of nightfall
for the city is silent
in this witching hour of her heart;
her misbegotten heart which,
with - step by step - every beating
also grabs, in her own way, fragments of reality.

So, she wanders through the whisper-lighted streets
by taking pictures and immortalizing shapes,
searching for a dead-end for finding a living door,
a door, which she may be able to preserve,
to his sorrow-sealed soul.
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