Swallow The Poison
Swallow the poison
Trade your day
Time for money
Life’s wasting away
Work to live
Not to thrive
It’s all you can do
Just to survive
Take a moment
Look around
This is your life
What have you found?
Your kids are old
Your friends are gone
Your dreams are unmet
But you can’t move on
You earn just enough
To cover the bills
You know what would happen
If you took ill
You’d lose your job
And then the house
Then the car
Then the spouse
So every day
No matter what
You swallow your poison
The only hope you’ve got
To earn enough
To survive the night
And do it all again
The daily fight
Not quite the fairytale
You were promised in youth
But let’s be honest
No-one could accept the truth
It’s the daily grind
Called that for a reason
To hope for other wise
Is demonized as treason
We are in this together
The workers plea
Collective repression
Then distracted depravity
Work for the weekend
Then pay to play
Porn, liquor, and drugs
Then some takeaway
It’s not in your budget
But you convince yourself it’s okay
Cause it’s all you can do
To survive another workday
Don’t think of the future
It’s far to long
30 years more of this
What could possibly go wrong?
But hey!
Doesn’t retirement actually seem good?
Finally you have the time needed
To do everything you wish you now could
So you delay gratification
Of most every form of joy
Problem is you’ll be too old by then
To enjoy it anyway
Still you delude yourself
It’s part of the poison
Swallowing your dreams
Then acting with caution
Besides those weekend benders
Leave you with little spare wealth
With little motivation
With diminishing health
You sometimes wonder
How you ended up here
Overwhelmed by resentment
You crack another beer
‘It is what it is’
‘Inflation is high’
‘It capitalisms fault’
To yourself you justify
There goes the weekend
It’s time for another dose
Off to work again
Hunting that promotion grandiose
A different brand of poison
A variation of the old promise
You’ll get paid far more
Cause you’re no longer a novice
In your new role
You think you will finally be free
Until it dawns on you
All that extra responsibility
Even less time
For those that you love
For the friends you don’t see
For all the hobbies you let go of
But what other choice
Could you realistically pursue?
If you changed path now
Only chaos would ensue
So you swallow the poison
You trade your day
Exchanging time for money
Letting your life waste away
This poem is from the book Wage Slave, The Unpaid Overtime Edition
