It’s been a while.

Not between posts. I post poems regularly and hopefully will be able to continue to do so. The poems are life lines. They’re annotations to my days: days on the job. Days in between the job. Wandering free form in an endless no-scape manufactured by the money machine. It’s been a while since I’ve had time to write the text I’m constantly contextualizing.

I read online about the Great Resignation, I read about the new COVID variant. I read. I have a writer friend, a fine writer and musician that has written of his own work as a form of interpretation of current events. Though his writing has, of late, returned to the spiritual wanderings that I see as more instrumental in his work than his commentaries on current events. There’s only so much you can write about current events before it starts to feel a repetitive assault. The money machine chugs and chugs and churns. And like any machine made for mass production, the product is boiler plate and predictable: shit, misery, delusion. Rinse, repeat.

What is it people think they’re resigning from? A job? Oppression? Disaster Capitalism? Do the rules of the game play when you exchange for a different game piece? They want a better deal. I’m fine with that. They’ve decided their time is worth more. I’m fine with that, too. And still, the machine chugs on. I know people actively trying to separate from the machine but it’s not easy. If people really knew what it was to be outside the machine, most of them would shut the fuck up and march happily into the grinder.

Think I’m being dramatic? Lose your cell phone. Lose your state ID, your social security card. Lose your bank card. Walk in the world without tethers and see how long you last. That’s a road most can’t walk. That’s why most don’t.

My jobby job means I choose to dive into the machine when I work. I have a front facing job that adds no grace to world at all. But sometimes, when I’m very lucky, I bump up against honest grace, honest beauty: inevitable variations on the mass-produced American widget.

The choice matters. There are sacred ties that bind, that mean I choose to wander the no-scape. I love my wife, the art we’re creating: our life. Most of my working life has been a scrap and a scramble. It’s been a burning, a rebuilding, and a burning. The poems are lifelines, annotations. They’re points on a compass. So I don’t get lost.