Author of the suspenseful, paranormal romances in my Stranger Creatures series. Also writing poetry, science fiction, and fiction. Sharing info about new book releases by different authors, poems, contests, and more
Image description – photo of the James River which is mostly obscured by a rusty transmission tower, the view underneath railroad tracks, and an expansive building. The blue afternoon sky is slightly hazy and grayish.
What inspired the poem Slow?
Promotions and promises of better pay, and maybe, just maybe, a chance to rest and take proper vacations- these are carrots, pulled on strings by corporate executives who profit off the backs of employees who give up so much of their lives yet receive hollow promises and inadequate compensation in return. People are asked to do more work than their bodies are meant to perform and once they manage to meet harsh deadlines or produce an outrageous amount of revenue, even bigger results are asked of them, all while employers use the common tactic of decreasing the number of workers available to perform tasks.
Workers are being shamelessly exploited and underpaid in the United States. Where does it end? What must employees give up in order to produce the results that should never have been asked of them? For some, the answer is to slow down and take care of themselves, to take time off instead of giving all their time to a corporation that doesn’t care about them, and to fight back against ridiculous deadlines by decreasing their pace to one that doesn’t feel like it’s pulling them into an early grave.
could help save the world which was gasping for air
and grasping for another chance
The animals that survived
all hid in the shadows and pulled knives
when we tried to outsmart them
And not many things grow in the soil
where our hatred exploded
Factories followed the lead scientist’s careful specifications
to produce quiet, profit-sized, edible squares
that don’t sleep or eat or bleed
Manufactured meat slabs would never dream
of breaking free
They were infused with extra proteins
and something else, it seemed
The manufactured meat
had secret teeth that sank venom
into our veins
and drained away the people
they were meant to feed
Save the world
Save the animals
And the perfect meat
infused with secret teeth
found new houses
and ate and slept and dreamed
but they never once
made the earth bleed
Image description – photograph is of the skeletal frame and empty inside of a burned-down house
I wrote this poem after reading that scientists have found a way to grow meat in a lab from stem cells of animals. This meat production method sounds like it could be a good idea. Maybe it’s a good idea. Maybe nothing will go wrong, but so many things could. What if the manufactured meat wasn’t soulless cubes that would just willingly allow themselves to be consumed?
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.
Christina Lynn Lambert 