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Another Work Anxiety Poem

Alan Catlin

We’ve been sent to the Elon
Musk re-education camp to
reconsider our life choices and
to reorder our priorities.
I feel as if I should be resisting,
and they must as well, forcing
them to strip me naked and
shove me into a Whirlpool
sized basin filled with churning,
discolored, cold water. My two
attendants look like standard
issue strong arm enforcer types
left over from a black and white
gangster movie and they are grilling
me about Latin tenses, declensions
I never learned and try to tell them
my wife was the Classics major
but that only makes them angrier
and I sense they are going to
subject me to a water torture worse
than the cold water one involving
dunking, restraints, and prodding
with blunt objects, the kind of stuff
that used to be thought of as
therapeutic in asylums back in
the dark ages a few decades ago.
They don’t have to be specific but
the implication is there will be blood
in the water before long and a noise
torture involving a Bob Dylan
imitator singing folk songs in Romanian.
Regardless of what happens next
my refusal to talk suggests I will be
blamed for everything that will go
wrong like when a private rocket
launch explodes and they will need
someone to pick up all the pieces
including the body parts. Like it or
not, custodial work is my future,
is my job now.

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