Slow Death Among The Toner Cartridges

Quit your job.

It's a mundane sort of hell.
There's a mug waiting for you
in the canteen cupboard.
There are people who know whether you take sugar in your tea,
how much milk you have
in your coffee.
Your computer has desktop wallpaper
you picked for yourself.
There are appraisals, and sometimes biscuits.
You get a card on your birthdays,
scribbled with a score of
sincere, benevolent,
utterly generic messages.

It would be all right, if it
wasn't so awful, if it
wasn't so meaningless, if it wasn't so
always the same for the rest of your life.

But it pays the bills,
almost.
Your boss has told you you've got
management potential.
It's a steady income.
In a few years, you'll qualify for
the pension scheme.
We don't all get to be astronauts.
And besides, there's always alcoholism to fall back on.

The prospect of this orderly, straightforward, functional future
stretching away into the waning grey distance
has the brain shutting down,
synapse by synapse.
Nothing bright or unpredictable
can happen anymore,
not inside this
standardised skull.

You're not getting paid enough for this.
Get out.
Get out before they drive you sane.

Reviews

[Terrence Chang]

Vivid writing. Straight to give a good image. Well penned.

[Relic]

The mundane assortments of life mix themselves into a depressing crap salad that' not fun to eat after the 89th time I suppose. I can hear your voice in the background saying there's gotta be something better than this. Always a good write from you Nico.

[maria a frey]

Loved it! Straightforward and edgey.

[maricoona91]

Hey,
Wow, I really like your style (haha). You get to the point, are straight forward, speak in an almost conversational way, but it still flows amazingly. The point of this poem is really powerful and speaks to everyone I think. It can be related to everyone's life who is struggling for something more in life.
Thanks for such a great poem! I hope to read more of your stuff.
ps I bet you aren't really pretentious, and if you are, at least you are aware of it ;)

[Arezzo]

This is, by a long way, the best thing I've read on this site. You hade me laughing out loud FOUR times in the course of my first attempt at reading it. The observation is exquisite, the examples are perfectly-chosen and the acidic humor is to die for.

You have identified with uncanny precision the thing that's so mortifying about an office job ... the dreadful, unrelenting NICENESS of it all.

An unreserved 100!

[Nico Reznick]

Wow... Thank you so much. It's a hatefully benign environment, isn't it? And the illusion of freedom can suck you in so insidiously, until you forget you can leave.

Thanks again for your kind comment. It's awesome to hear that you got it.