The Job
Time was privatized long ago.
The firm that absorbed it,
a major multicosmic,
plans only to gut and chop and sell it off.
Meanwhile, those images you see
among our peasantry
of smiling Adam walking with a doggy
dinosaur are ads,
like any faith or flag. Even your and my
own dialectics, gentle reader,
are like those ancient signs on kudzued walls,
drawn painfully by hand
for some doomed local brand.
The executive in charge of what remains,
resentful, never at his desk,
thinks often of quitting
but where could he go? Beyond the office
is no life, only time;
as if in a strong wind, he would
dissolve into grey dust
like any supervillain.
Frederick Pollack is author of two book-length narrative poems, The Adventure and Happiness (Story Line Press), and two collections, A Poverty of Words (Prolific Press, 2015) and Landscape with Mutant (Smokestack Books, UK, 2018). Many other poems in print and online journals.