SHI(f)T...for the working class in love

SHI(f)T
- j.luna

“Robots have feelings too…”
-Crackout

I am employee number 0014_
and this is my cubicle
This is my sanctuary from hunger and poverty.
my cell.

This is where i do time
This is where i slave for nine hours (or more)
This is where i write my praises for
The Material
The Capitalist and
The Corporate

This is my world
and my viewing room
my Inspiration Booth

This is where i sit all day;
where i write not what my mind dictates:
hope
desire
bottled emotions
love
instead, encoding the lies forced and ordered by the system that feeds me
eulogies for:
The Man
Consumerism
False hope
False Prosperity

Wasting away
tied to the shift
and the headphones that
i wear—listening
to the music blasting
from my playlist
pretending
not to care
nor feel
anything for the outside world,
my co-mechanisms of the Machine,
and for my co-robot-
my co-robot
whom i watch anxiously with beating clockwork,
as i stare from the glass walls of my cubicle
all day
hoping to touch
her
brown synthetic hair
and to feel the warmth of her carbon nape
but my fingers cannot—
they are chained by invisible wires
designed not to stroke and caress
but to type away on the cold lifeless keyboard
of the Company PC—
my battery,
artificial lung,
my life source which
also fuels my slow tortuous deterioration.

i ask with routinary grudge:
“when will this program end?”
wishing to escape..
but most importantly,
wishing that she will feel the signals i send through the air
wishing that she will know,
understand and accept
without me speaking out
lest i risk
to ruin
the professional,
the rapport,
the pseudo balance of the Most Sacred Workplace…

Forced to accept the painful truth of things that can never be!

But still
hoping…
Hoping that in time
my clockwork heart
will burst
explode!

Hurling shards of suppressed affection
like bullets
shattering the
glass walls of my cell!
Shrapnels
flying off towards her
hitting her hard
when she is most vulnerable—
while she is sitting still
with closed-circuit eyes glued to her
desktop’s monitor
waiting for
the
slow
dragging shift
to end
shattering the
glass walls of her
cubicle
setting her free
while I
become human
at last.

"Money is like a sixth sense without which
you cannot make use of the other five.
Without an adequate income,
half the possibilities of life are
shut off..."
-Somerset Maugham