Everyone's a Poet

Underneath this hat it's all brains, baby...

Coping with the day to day insanity (and inanity) of our earthly existence can be tough. Therefore, I bring you a poem that sums it up courtesy of my coworker (front desk receptionist) who writes under the name of Shadwynn to reflect his Wiccan beliefs and express his true self through the mighty pen. Yeats and Wordsworth are surely reserving a place among the greats for Shadwynn, no?

SECOND WIND
by Shadwynn
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A jangling alarm routinely reminds us
to paint tired hope
upon our morning masks
in dawn-washed pastels of flimsy resolution,
an exercise in self-deception promising
fresh energy to face yet another day
while falling hard, we crash
onto cold, concrete reality
deserted by the last drained cup of coffee.

Plodding days parade themselves
into insensible paramnesia,
dying cigarettes of time
put out like burnt butts,
their tell-tale smoke hanging heavily
in the stale air of stagnant lives
compartmentalized in corporate boredom,
the daily death of working repetition,
like those sequential numbers
in squares upon the wall, calendar dates
dividing tedium's melancholic monotony.

Inhaling each moment that meets us
numbed with a nicotine far more dangerous
than cancer sticks or coffin nails,
we succumb, unfeelingly addicted
to a consistent consumption of time,
the hypnotic cycle of the work-a-day week
where regularity steals our soul,
its steady stream of hours unpunctuated
by nerve-tingling terror
or the elation that exhilarates sluggish spirits.

Like worn-out workaholics,
we are often weak in the knees
from the stress-testing treadmill
where no race holds hope for a reachable win,
sundown sliding our stride
to a nondescript dragging of reluctant feet
toward the same frayed finish line
draped across our dwelling's door.
We lean in, crossing its threshold
into evening exhaustion.
Psychically pulverized by the daily grind,
employees indentured to industrial pharaohs
sometimes murmur desperate prayers
invoking the capricious god of the second wind
for one last, lung-bursting surge of stamina
in a sprint to warp speed, an escape,
a letting go for life
lived in all of its glorious failure,
an unpredictable adventure
where risk and resolve
reveal the many guises of grace.

Disclaimer: VA Peach is not responsible for any bodily harm suffered as a result of reading the work above, i.e. vomiting, extreme eye-rolling, uncontrollable groaning, etc.