Mechanistic

Numbers, accounting for nothing,
Gather around us like silt
Additive, subtractive, factoring
Toward meaningless totality.

In arithmetical lives
Time counts itself like coin:
It is precious; it is money;
It is slipping away despite us.
Its residue, life’s small change, goes on
Rattling into tomorrow’s empty pocket.

Life and work in tension,
In contrast or in contradiction,
Finds allotted days stripped down
To hours, minutes, tiny seconds,
In the clockwork of production.

However laid out, rearranged,
Service is made to mesh like gears.
Cogs interlock like moving prisons.
The wheels of fortune grind.

Reason casts no light,
Sheds no shadow here
As the tightened patterns
Shift and shape.

Slackness is removed,
Whittled down to bone.
There is nothing left to cut away
Until the hot metal teeth spiral
Hard against the soul.

In our caged-bird house
Instruction rasps expectation
Against willingness,
Drags a half-hearted shrug from the shadows
To be the god of things well done.

Each moment bears witness,
Stands sentry over any lightness of being
Where agility might have stepped.
We creep arthritic and slow,
Driven by drums we do not beat
In monotonous flam and rhythm.

But the dance is a dance no more.
Only dull steps across the floor
Of our necessity.…

Where we are always on time,
Dismally on time.

Initialising