Earning a living

Unfold, tape, scan, tape, label ship
Unfold, tape, scan, tape, label ship
Unfold, tape, scan, tape, label ship
Six simple steps and I send away the words that could change the world
All for $7.50 an hour
Mindlessly I drone through the arduous labor of annihilation
I carelessly rip the covers off of Shakespeare�s great works
All the tragedies and comedies
The ones that transcended the realms of time
And then, I put Chaucer into cardboard confinement
And not even the poets are spared.
I remember a young man�s title as
�Blinking with fists� and I tried to interpret that as
I procrastinated sending it to its demise
Because when you send back a book
It is sending cows to the slaughter house
And when they arrive there
The covers that have not already been separated
Are torn cleanly off the works of art
And the pages of infinite wisdom and knowledge are bathed in acid
The beauty of the words wiped clean
The literal genius vanished
And they are born again as comic books
Or more boxes to put books in, to send more
Books to die, to become boxes, to place books in
So they can perish, to become boxes
And so on, until somebody starts thinking
Or at least runs out of boxes
But then it occurs to me
That I am not paid to think
I am paid to destroy the words that could change the world
And erase record of such radiance
Forever
Still, just to spite the overlord,
My gears started turning away again
Grinding out thoughts and concepts
Like corn on the old mills
Fueled and driven by the bloody hands of the slaves
They abused
And those men were never paid for anything,
Especially thinking
And yet, I burn the words they bled
To understand
And eventually say
$7.50 and hour to kill ideas and revelations
I pray that I could have
Sometimes while packing them into
Cattle cars of cardboard
I wonder if god
Play games with people like this
Because I have witnessed such beautiful works of
Anatomy and intellect
Ripped apart and scorched into a charred ember
Of what they used to be
And I cannot locate a reason
I wonder if he looks at certain criteria
Whether he opens the cover of our
Personality, flips through the abridged
Pages of our and either shelves us
Or sends us to burn
Like our store does with the sales report
And the literary masterpieces
We send to obliteration
But I do know one tragic fact
I know is that I send the words that
Could change the world, to burn in an
Ignorant inferno
And as reciprocation, all I receive
Is the gift of insomnia
(Because I cannot find serenity through the screams of the language)
And a mere
$7.50 per hour