Unsung

Ponder everything

You survived today

You did not want to read that story, or watch that TikTok again

Feigning enthusiasm; hoping that your gritted teeth

Could be mistaken for a passable smile

You got on with it, though

You did it because you love the hungry mind

Of your son or your daughter or your patient or your parent

Whose memory makes what's familiar strange and new again

Despite the medication that you have heard such good things about

You did not want to trudge to the laundry with the other servants

Of the slow accumulation of filth and embarrassing stains

You did not want to worry about the cleanliness of a public machine

Democracy can be hard to live with, but you love it just the same

How ecstatically you dreamed of a gleaming utopia

Where the robots do the laundry so that the artists are free to make art

Dystopias often feature people doing uncomfortable things in public

Because they cannot afford privacy

Liquid detergent looks like the blood of something H.P. Lovecraft

Inadvertently conjured from the abyss with just one, cold poem

You did not want to wait until the machine tells you it's time

More and more, you feel a primitive desire

To tell the machine to mind its own business

Welling in the pulsing, primate heart that you are ashamed

To call your own, because it will be immobile and dark one day

While this machine will carry on, blithely washing things away

You have to be presentable, so as not to alarm the other humans

Hide your shame beneath this beige anonymity

You washed and dried as you lamented owning it at all

Like they'd let you own anything of genuine worth

You did not want to look around and wonder why the groceries

All seem slightly surprised to be where they are, green and unharmed

Costing several times what anyone with sense would pay

Something about supply chains, just shut up and get on with it

You did not want to calculate the number of drab, desultory days

Between today and the dirty scythe of a best before date

Which, if you're honest, you can see in your own, foggy rearview

But here you are, debating whether to show your basket bounty

To the sulking, hairy confusion of a young, dour trainee

Or to a machine that is set to take that disappointment's job

You must go on, and you must eat, if that is to be accomplished

You ought to be eating cleanly, mindfully, in a manner that is ecologically justifiable

You ought to pay for kale, though when it spoils, it smells like

The unfortunate result of filling a swamp with regrets

You have just given up some of the digits that allow you to keep

Up appearances, along with all those of whom you are fond

And those who boss you around and rob your every lunch of joy

To sentence yourself to a week of grudging kale

You did not want to have your intelligence insulted

By someone with no business talking to you that way

But you smiled, politely, while in the private cinema of your imagination

This manager or customer or preacher or teacher or similar creature

Was sore afflicted, by a rainbow of calamities

You take it as you would a bitter tonic

For you need to endure another day

That would be ruined by the consequences

Of frankly telling whoever it is that tells you what to do

Begone from my sight!

I have been doing this longer than you have

I remember when you were hired, because I remember wishing

I had been ill, or given some legitimate alibi

For missing your first day

And here you are now

In bright, new, expensive colors

Yelling at my expired wardrobe as if I were a fool or a child

To do a thing you barely understand and do not care about

Because someone who tells you what to do told you to tell me

That this must be done differently: upscale the AI

Make the new technology comfortable, and then

Teach it to understand redundancy

And then use you to explain that it is cost efficient

To allow machines to throw idle despair and deprivation

Over human beings like a coffin's lid

But you bit your raw, dry tongue

You uttered a normal, gentle sentence in a normal, gentle tone

You dd as you were told and when you were permitted to depart

You grimly tried to make the kale imitate delicious, salty fat

You washed up, and you collapsed, and you did dream

Of a dimly recollected evening, orange and woven with jagged shadows

When you told your patient, feline audience

That on the whole, this world and way of being

Suited you just fine, like any clean, warm little spot

Crises and catastrophes cascaded across all the screens then, too

But far fewer of them were the work of human beings, gone astray

Attention was not something of which you felt you were being robbed

By a greedy cartoon generated by machines that think they think

Plagues were a part of history, not Sunday's blaring headline

Morons and mental patients could run, but they would never win

You have endured all of this: the small, persistent indignities

That you will trade for making your favorite hearts laugh

Perhaps they are your children, giggling through infancy

Or trading cryptocurrency for their baffled souls

Perhaps they have the arms of your beloved

Thrown behind them after an implausible feast

With sated belly and tumbling eyelids, flags of soft contentment

You know who they are

You ate all of these shards

To keep them whole

They may be memories, now

The ones who showed you

A way through all of it

To a life you could be glad of living

Especially when it was hard

You are what they hope, or hoped

You would become

Hero enough

To get the best of a trial named today

Unsung