Overtaken

This is inevitable. I sleep. I wake up.
The whiskers grow all night
and every morning I chop them off.
The sound of the traffic out
on the highway is constant.
I drive the hour to work,
then I drive it back home. The same
faceless drivers are always out there.
They weave, careen, slam on brakes,
fill the highways with chaos.

I take my pills- colored ones in the morning,
white ones in the evening. I cook, eat, and shit,
over and again each day. I must take a leak
a dozen times. The television spews
news and entertainment nonstop,
and so does the radio. It gets to be just
noise after a while. So does hearing
people talk sometimes, endless streams
of words and phrases coming from out
of millions of mouths to pollute the air
like huge flocks of dirty birds that block
the sun from view.

And everywhere I look there are clocks
and watches of all sorts, drumming
the rhythm of endless time. They pound out
the eternal cadence of minutes and hours
that drag like an anchor on the ocean
floor, drag like Elliot’s ragged claws
along the beach, sullen and cold-blooded.
Mindless machines, they haunt me.

Sometimes when I think about all of it,
how it happens continually, days, weeks,
years, I want to open a vein. This is called
tedium, and it overtakes me like a deep case
of the blues. I wallow, then turn to rust.