Tag Archives: change

Wreck the Monoliths #poems #poetry #essays #equality

Wreck the Monoliths

Corporations eat a steady diet

of wage theft

and rise as monoliths

crushing homes and hopes in their wake

The stone slabs grow steel cables

Tentacles

meant to choke us into desperation

The monoliths tell us to be good little worker bees

and carry the weight of their excess

But when the prospect of spending a lifetime

ensnared 

becomes too much to endure

a whisper drifts

through the stifling atmosphere

rolling into a thundering shout 

until all of the bees

decide to do nothing

forcing stone walls to crumble into ash

and we all agree

to never build our prisons again

Image Description: a photograph of two large yellow sunflowers. A yellow and black butterfly sits on one of the sunflowers.

Life has been weird and uncertain lately. I’m fearful that the US will regress permanently and women and minorities have drastically reduced rights. It’s strange that my kids are growing up in a time where they already have fewer rights than I had as a teenager. I grew up in the 1990s, during the time where music festivals and ragged flannel shirts were plentiful. The rebellion against the status quo was rippling out from obscure punk bands and becoming prevalent in more mainstream music, across several genres. The trend of pushing boundaries rather than adhering to them was seen in the types of television, movies, books, and magazines gaining in popularity.

Books and music were an inspiration, a way to begin difficult conversations and gauge other people’s openness to the way our little part of the world was moving forward. I had always loved reading, and around the time I hit the high school, the library down the street from home expanded it’s offerings considerably. I found a plethora of books authored by women. In these stories, the female characters, whether they were heroines or side characters, were portrayed with actual depth rather than being shown as one-dimensional plot devices that propped up the male characters. I loved that these stories were written in a way where a woman’s curiosity and imperfections were not used as morality devices intended to instill fear and shut down questions. Sadly, the time has come again where books that pose such important questions are being frequently hidden from the people who seek answers.

There have always been book bans. Political leaders and ultra conservatives don’t want us questioning the laws and rules we’re expected to live under. They don’t want us to be able to find the right words to prove that they’re trying to create a society that benefits only them. Any version of history other than the sanitized, colonized words of writers who couldn’t begin to understand how much empathy they lacked, is being removed from the shelves and tossed in the proverbial fire, once again.

Some states now require parents to accompany their children, even kids old enough to drive and take SATs, through the library and authorize all books checked out. Imagine the information that will be lost, the staggering amount of opportunities for learning and progressing forward that will be crushed because information is being hidden with foolish fervor.

I miss the innocence of thinking progress and rights that had been fought for and won before and during my childhood would be guaranteed in perpetuity. I miss the security of thinking things would continuously improve for people who had often been denied opportunities in the past. While advancements in medicine and technology had been phenomenal, humanity’s capacity to lift each other up and care for one another does not seem to have evolved.  

During the past thirty years, I have completed a master’s degree, raised two children, changed careers to become a writer, and dealt with various health issues that gave me a glimpse at my own mortality. In all that time, my country has become increasingly bigoted and intolerant, and those perpetrating such ignorance have been noticeably more empowered by political leaders to speak out and enact laws that openly discriminate.

Power hungry billionaires and CEOs want more wage serfs to serve their purposes. In time, it won’t just be poor people, people of color, or women whose lives and chances for prosperity become drastically limited. After a while, the billionaire class will come for everyone but their own, even the millionaires. The line of inequality will continue moving and if we don’t scream about things and disrupt the process now, there may be no way out of the path of becoming human ants who have no time to do anything except work brutal hours before falling into an exhausted sleep, yet still barely make enough to survive.

I don’t know what will happen in the next few years or decades, but I can’t just sigh and accept the inevitability of living in a sad, subservient future. I will continue to write stories and poetry that shows truths and possibilities, I will make phone calls and show up in protest lines, I will ask questions, and I will find as many ways as possible to resist.

Minor Inconvenience of Snow #naturepoems #poetry #slowtheproductivity #poems

Minor Inconvenience of Snow

Outside the plexiglass window

Snow is falling

but my computer doesn’t care

The rubber band health insurance leash

snaps my body back

into an office retrofitted

with the best surveillance tech

Eyes on the screen or the algorithmic bitch will catch me

Slacking

Blinking

Questioning the meaning

Snow is falling outside

Can’t dream inside the plastic terrarium

Not until the fifteen-minute break I never get to take

Sticky film of recycled office air

clings to my skin

until everything tastes like microwavable dinners

Occasional vacations

let the hemorrhage of my discontent

bleed

When my time is up

I pack the wounds with fiberglass and return

to my capsule of misery

dreading and hoping for the day

my blood and fire are fully replaced

by autopilot strings

that type my reports and guide me from meeting to meeting

And the heartbeat of the world outside

becomes a minor inconvenience

Image description – image is a photo of a snow-covered pine tree. The branches are low due to the weight of the snow and hang down in such a way that they create a pathway between the hanging branches and the other trees standing at the edge of the forested area.

About the poem (a small rant):

I looked outside the other day and saw snow falling. My first instinct was to ignore it. Before becoming a writer, I worked at different office jobs as well as in sales and retail. The way companies and managers treated their employees as resources to be used up and discarded motivated me to seek a master’s degree in business management. I wanted to know how to explain to people creating the rules that there was a better way. In my naivete, I hadn’t yet realized that the system is the way it is because laws have favored corporations instead of people. Even now, years later, although I create my own schedule, the muscle memory of being unable to rest for a moment, to take a break, to breathe, to step back and think, has my first instinct being to keep working, keep going, keep moving even when it’s not productive or when the world outside has moments to offer more important than whatever project I’m working on.

And if the requirement of long working hours without enough staff isn’t bad enough, software designers have created some dystopian as hell products to further micromanage employees. Productivity software and worker surveillance equipment are tools meant to be used to force already exhausted employees to push themselves to the brink of burnout, maybe even past, in order to achieve the unrealistic expectations set by company shareholders and managers who will never be expected to work under such heinous conditions. Legislators in the US have been funded heavily by corporations and as a result, tend to pass laws that favors corporate entities rather than forcing employers to pay employees a living wage or make employee health, safety, and well-being a priority. Companies are allowed to overwork and underpay their staff in the guise of at-will employment laws. Workers are breaking under the weight of laws that don’t benefit them and those in power push the myth that success will come to those who grind harder, and that magical bootstraps of determination will pull us all up the corporate ladder into a lifestyle of solvency and comfort, if we just put in more effort and give our jobs everything we have and then some.

Every decade, working conditions degrade further down the rabbit hole full of spiders and jagged rocks. Politicians often like to push the narrative that we’re living the theoretical dream of a completely free-market economy and that the whole system is designed to stimulate competition and keep the prices on goods and services low. Nah, the system has been designed to keep people compliant and too tired and broke to fight. 

Laws need changing so people can have time to do more than work, sleep a couple hours, rinse, and repeat. We should all be able to live, rather than hanging on for dear life to make it to the next few vacation days, or worse, hanging on for dear life just to make rent. Laws need changing so employers can’t treat people like expendable commodities. In the meantime, may we all find ways to slow the productivity and to strip the grease from the gears of the machine that eats us while it feeds us.