Sweat + Sacrifice = Success
is the math painted on their wall. With blissful exuberance, she tosses wildly, apparently happy to be part of the equation. He stares buff and confident at a conquerable horizon.
I run in place for hours, and never seem to get the result they sell. A matter of time and perserverance, I remind myself. But mostly, it just seems like I’m wasting time on this wheel.
Sisyphus would be ashamed at our fitness inventions. Ixion, too.
We live under the illusion of Heaven, operate with the ruddy gears of Hell, cycled in an endless war that pits us against each other.
I watch the cascade of the faces of the dead on the news. Violence in the name of faith, messages written in the blood of the innocent, and I run faster, away from the creature we’re becoming. The markets trade the golden hearts of our fallen, classy sacrifices to greedy gods.
The world is against you now, the fringe becoming more comfortable than solace with a misguided people.
Some of us remain as windows to a different human world, where murders aren’t marked by the passages of fairy tales, where product sales aren’t the personal sum of success, where we don’t hum along to the deep cacophony of the blinded chorus, and tomorrow isn’t a repeat of the sullen patterns of the present.
Portals to a different place, panes to a brighter space.
I trace a fast and dusty to path to there–come cramp, catastrophe or casualty.
I cannot stop this running in place, speeding to nowhere, spokes rusted from the
race.
