Breaking the Back

on leaving school immersed in philanthropic notions
(of a kind these days I find unthinkable)
I pulled my frail frame onto my charger and rode off into a sunset
with agenda predictable.
fresh faced — young dumb and tragically convinced that
blind faith could make an infantile, normative
playground theory on social interaction
positive enough to show them all, but alas!
working the tills put hair on my chest,
telesales made me a man! x2
and everything was going to be ok, but
the making of the man was the breaking of the back upon the rock
of everyday hostility.
and I don’t mean to seem at all ungrateful, but
the air-conditioned life has left me gasping for some real conversation.
and just because
turing couldn’t possibly conceive a machine with this little personality
I’m working shifts in veal-fattening pens,
and yet I’m puppy thin because to tell the truth I’ve been hanging on
for something more than distant dial tones
and a sense of ending.
the breaking of the back was the making of the man x4.