Trigger Warning
Orpheus drags his offspring
Into the river
To make something of the plain text
Of scut work.
The hard, droning drudgery of hours,
The hard boredom
Testing the mind’s malleable nature;
The creative edge
Of induced void, beauty from vacuity;
The torn fraction
Of intellectual privation buds
The straining stem.
Plain text of hours of work in a pyroclast
Of raw sensation;
And yet a dull rhythm embedded in
Embellishments
Like sunrise, birdsong, rainfall is interpreted
Through the meagre beat
Of manual labour. Is the soul fed by this
In unadorned time?
Mine is repelled by the plain activities
Of unembellished time,
Endured for its end, like any paycheck
(mine’s for poetry books);
And attracted to the other work, the one
That refines the day
Into the beauty of natural sensation
Unsynchopated.