clock work

Originally Published in Issue #9 of Anarkiss Zine

There is a clock

saturated in melancholy

ticking behind schedule.

It’s plenty wise that it’s batteries 

will be so violently ripped from its back

any minute.

It’s behind. 

Was it just the cards it was dealt?

The children that built it were under a lot of stress that day.

Maybe we just cut the guy some slack.

Maybe believe in equity and not equality- not all clocks are made equally. Child clocks don’t all have the same access to a good education. 

Maybe understand the conditions it was conceived in and let it TICK A LITTLE TO THE LEFT if it needs to, for Christ’s sake!

But no. That’s idiotic. It’s a clock. It can’t run behind!

It’s in the handbook, it’s company policy. We’re sorry little guy- 

we like having you around, but there’s really nothing we can do. 

We have to let you go. It’s nothing personal. 

Okay, I get you have a family to feed, but our organization needs to run seamlessly. Like 

clockwork. 

Think of us like a band.

What if Alex Van Halen was always a half a beat late?

So - you understand then? If the whole world kept clocks running behind on the wall, we wouldn’t have Van Halen, we wouldn’t have Seinfeld, we wouldn’t have wars, we wouldn’t have companies, conglomerates, self-driving cars, or corporate ladders. We wouldn't have cocaine, caffeine, or Coca-Cola™ in the workplace. We wouldn’t have crack in the projects or in the colleges. We wouldn’t have horse drawn carriages riding past homeless people butt-fucking in central park, carousels going around in circles in empty malls, candy synthetically made for human consumption, colgate toothpaste, or chinese labor. We wouldn’t have campuses, classrooms, common core mathematics, cryogenically frozen heads, Christopher Nolan, Christopher Columbus, Camus, Cain and Abel, catholic guilt, county lines, cruises to the Caribbean, cameras capturing every mistake you ever make, child trafficking, checkbooks, or credit cards. Most importantly, we wouldn't have 

CASKETS. 

Like clocks, not all caskets are created equally. The flashier the casket, the more minutes you existed! Not lived, we aren’t in the business of promoting living, but existing. 

Did I mention consumers yet? How would the consumer know when its time to work, shop, sleep, eat, fuck without a properly working 

CLOCK. 

You wouldn’t want to live in a world without all that, now, would you?

Exactly. So you see why we must put our hands inside your opening and rip out the very thing that makes you tick. It’s better for us all this way. 

Just imagine a world without Van Halen!