9 to 5

9 to 5 it is your shift.

From 9 to 5, our souls are cut. Eaten by the faceless suits. From 9 to 5, we are slipping into a meat grinder, marrow and guts flying around. Unaware, we kneel to our gods, offering our minds, our keys, our first borns. We drop them into the green vortex whose bottom keeps growing every day. We are the children of poverty, the proverbial 99, the fires of our ambitions slowly covered in sleet as forgotten Christmas bonuses, rejected vacations, unpaid overtimes pass by. From 9 to 5, we exhale oxygen, killing ourselves as we crouch on our desks, working for the main man whose business it is to be a business. We are the means of production and we are owned by the almighty dollar, its whip unneeded as we serve our master with the dreams of reward. From 9 to 5, we are proud with humiliation, we relish the chitchats of the flashing computer screens in our boxed offices and cubicles, punching away the data of our lives. We are the sons of war, the generation of heroes, our battles are daily, our demons are imposed. We eat paper and shit ink. From 9 to 5, we are oiled by wages, energized by alms, as syndicated beggars trolling around the cathedral, or the whore who gives 99% of her fucking money to the greasy guy in purple. We bite our lips and bang our heads on the door, and we all keep a gun in our desk, with one bullet — and we only need one — always ready to shoot, to let explode, to let a company-sponsored funeral, with a flag, and a 9-arm salute, and the whole nine yards.

From 5 to 9, we rebuild ourselves. We pat ourselves on the back. We remind ourselves that we are human. We hug our children, we kiss our wives, we fuck our boyfriends. We draw, we write, we paint, we sing, we act, we fornicate, we defecate, we practice martial arts, we do tai chi. We pray to a deaf god for release, we masturbate to a perfect tomorrow, we remember the young boy who submitted his application — what, five, ten, fifteen, twenty years ago — eager and innocent, wanting, just wanting, one chance to make the world. Just one chance to make the world.

From 9 to 5, our souls are cut. Eaten by the faceless suits. From 5 to 9, we rebuild ourselves.

9 to 5 it is your shift.

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This is the 100 Songs Project, a 100-day writing challenge based on AFI’s 100 Years…100 Songs. Every day, I write a short poem, prose piece, or play based on, reacting to, rejecting, accepting, or doing something related to one of the songs in the top 100 list.

Please consider liking Deelaytful on Facebook. We’re doing a promotion in preparation for the 200th post in a couple of weeks. If we get 500 likes before the 200th post, I will be uploading a video of myself singing a medley of Disney Princesses songs on YouTube.

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