Everything’s fine

It was the end of hope at the start of a day.

“Everything’s fine, yet all is lost,”

repeated in my mind as I stumbled the stairs

down into the ever-present rush-hour.

Already so late, even at this early hour

on a day begun with burnt toast.

 

All things bright and beautiful

under the neon lights of morning-time

before first tea, while the day is still sleepy,

remembering the warm rest of a night just past.

Cock Sparrow chirps out his sure anthem

to an accompanying symphony

of taxis fighting the traffic.

 

In the cities of tall, taller, rich, richer,

the height of the tallest buildings,

counted in floors, means only that

the poor, poorer and poorest

never feel the warming rays of our Day Star.

We walk and talk in the monochrome shadows

of glass and steel surrounds.

 

… and into one of these richest, tallest I walked,

shadowless, hopeless,

hoping that in my lifetime of today,

things would be different.

“Eye-reader’s on the fritz again Mr Weltmann,”

with a ‘W’ like ‘well’ or ‘welfare’

rather than the ‘V’ in ‘vapourise’ or ‘vampire’,

which is what I wished.

 

“Just sign in here.”

The workday begun on their time,

to be paid for the sweat of my brow,

no blink of my eye required,

just a tooth-for-a-tooth on this morning,

with the eye-reader in need of shut-eye.

My burnt toast, its burnt circuits,

both now charred, black board.

 

A voice-programmed lift spoke softly,

(or was that in the dream I lived last night ?)

“Going UP ?, Going DOWN ?”

asks a Chinese voice trying to sound American.

“Going nowhere,” I blurted

“Velly good sir,”

with the ‘V’ like Weltmann

or ‘V-Day’, and down I plunge

from ground zero to the bedrock

of the bustling building, stalked by boredom.

 

To my niche in the work pool,

with a supervisor atop a tower,

like a life-guard raising semaphore flags that always ‘shout’

“Shark !”

Nevermind that I am drowning, even perhaps feared drowned

in a sea of lukewarm hopelessness.

The Mediterranean of my life has no Helen of Troy

with her thousand ships to be sailed,

mine is a sludge-pond of mud-brown ripples,

not a blue sea of white waves.

 

To work before the tea buzzer, that timely little bee

of the fifteen minute smoke break

when the hive empties and the faces of the workers

light up, like the ends of their ciggies.

We swarm onto the heavily barricaded balcony of the mezzanine

overlooking the underground basement parking garage.

Annie, a co-worker bee sits across from me,

loans me a fag … again –

(I must buy her a pack – she’s such a honey).

We throw our burning butts onto the roofs

of the executives’ cars.

The BM of the MD is a particular target for our stings,

intoxicated by the smoke and fumes we are.

 

‘A Critique on Nature’ is what I am editing,

like a post-modern Noah commenting on his

ark-filling task.

(I am really a glorified grammar-checker –

no creativity allowed)

 

Crocodile has filed no weather forecast.

Owl no flight plan,

Mole no technical drawings,

Ant no logistics manifest,

 

Surely this inefficiency spells disaster,

Creation on the bumpy road to

Destruction with a capital ‘D’.

 

(insert pic-stilllife-of gruesome blood and entrails roadkill)

 

C.O.M.A                        (Can Zombies go into a Coma ?)

Crow Moan                        (Sounds of a depressed crow)

Croowl Molant            (Great name for a Neanderthal)

 

I play these word games

with the texts I edit,

one day they’ll catch me

and then I’ll gettit.

 

in margine

Mother Nature has authored no reference,

she is textless, yet daily speaks volumes.

 

All Creatures great and small left to their own devices.

God ditched his own party, now Darwin is MC.

 

Up to the surface at 12h30,

a subterranean morning complete

for another day of my life.

No packed toasted sandwich lunch,

mine lies blackened and binned,

the cremated remains of my very early morning,

and what should have been a half-decent

lunchtime saving.

But there’s no salvation for burnt toast, so

to the Chilli Dog stand I stroll.

 

The vendor, unchanged since last week,

I mean he wears the same greasy jumpsuit

with matching grimaced smile,

repeats my order:

“One medium with hot relish, hold the mustard …

that’ll be ninety-five.”

The unchanged man takes my exact change –

Slop, slap, whop, wrap …

“Next”

 

… drip … drop … drip

 

“Damn … fuck …. Damn !”

(bright red relish right down the front of my only white shirt)

 

The Supervisor wants to know:

“Is that blood on your shirt Weltmann ?

Have you been in a bar-fight ?”

 

No it isn’t you wanker, and no I haven’t,

but come down out of your high-chair

and I’ll spill some of yours

on your poncey shirt, and knock out

your two front teeth as well.

 

“No Mr Clemence, it’s tomato relish from my lunch !”

“Get back to work Weltmann.”

“Yes Sir, sorry Sir.”

 

Every little thing I do is date-stamped,

not by magic, but by a computer-coded,

hash tag type barcode.

‘A Critique on Nature’ is #CN ▌║║│▌▌│║▌│▐║▐│▐   ww

I am date-stamped.

The ‘ww’ is me, Walter Weltmann

I am a lower case date stamp !

like canned food, library books

or software.

I have a Date of Manufacture,

a Best-Before-Date,

and an Expiry Date.

 

My life is a brown vanilla envelope

but without the aroma or flavour of vanilla,

so just a brown envelope … used

and date stamped … to be recycled.

 

Second Tea … 15h45 to 16h00 (strictly)

No eating, drinking or smoking

permitted in the building (strictly).

 

We stream out, pushing up against the barricades …

knees, hips, boobs, shoulders – a stew of body parts,

lips lighting up and breathing deeply our fix of nicotine,

tar, chemicals, inks, dyes, flavourants, preservatives,

other unknown, unpronounceable carcinogenics

and a cubic metre each of underground parking lot fumes

Ah … bliss for … twelve more minutes.

 

Security guards patrol the garage floor,

like white-tipped reef sharks poking

between the coral and rocks,

hunting for sleeping or careless fish.

“Everything’s fine, yet all is lost”

like a cold steel electric eel, snaking through the tepid

sea of my mind.

 

The graveyard shift of my lifetime as a day

begins as always with the polishing of my tombstone.

Clemence demands we ‘spit and polish’ our screens

before we leave, and so we do.

“And Weltmann, make sure you wear a clean shirt

in the morning”

(he even dresses like an Undertaker).

Out we file at exactly 16h45 under his hawkish eyes

to the moving, talking lift that takes us up and out

of his world to the security desk, and there

to sign out and back into the ‘real world’ –

a resurrection of the dead.

 

In that lift, on that day of a lifetime

I caught Annie’s eye, or did she mine

and I was sure she winked at me or was that

just where she got the nickname

‘Squint Eyed Annie’ –

“No” I said to myself

“Be positive – she’s into you,”

and I smiled at her, and she at me,

at least I think she did,

either that or she wanted repayment

for the loaned cigarettes.

 

It was the start of hope at the end of a day.

“Everything’s not lost, and all is fine,”

flashes the thought as I rush the stairs

up into the cardboard sanctuary that is my

bachelor-bedsitter.

So very early for the start of a long evening,

and an even longer night ahead

on this day that was a lifetime

begun so long ago with burnt toast.

 

Time to think of Annie and wash

tomato relish from my shirt.

 

Tomorrow, for sure

things will be different.