Woe to the Laborer

Woe to the "laborer" who pushes only paper and creates little value, save the ones and zeros that sustain his livelihood, pinched pennies usurped from the worth and decay of his fellows, keeping him harrowed, vacillating between life and death. Woe to the laborer who has no craft but, through intensive abandonment of self, has become the lynchman of freedom, the hatchetman of despotic will, the right hand of oligarchic tyranny, the sin-eater who absolves no one and commits himself to a terrestrial eternity of regrets and unfulfilled dreams. His life, a dribble. His imagination, wasted on false premises, bogus rules, faked power.

This has become the bankruptcy of the noble, artisanal man. A push-button for the machine that has become his heart. His pacemaker, the motor that keeps him trudging through a life without music, without poetry, without integrity, without soul. The treadmill of his existence tied up in a vault, pedometer, calorie counter, and a watch that calculates the milliseconds until his pacemaker goes kaput! His Samsara, the revolving door of dead-end jobs, of passionless ambitions, of false pretenses, of superficial relationships, of multiple credit cards, bank accounts, email addresses, identities, and sexual encounters. He dives through no wreck.* He ignores what damage has been done and the treasures that prevail.* His miserly existence befriended only by misery. His love of illusions, the warden of his cemented will. And so he dies with the regret that he was never free, never the artist of his own mystery.

*A tribute to Adrienne Rich and "Diving into the Wreck."