Author: Zane DeYoung

The Book of the Dead

Stretching out before me like some fat, seething lizard this roiling, 
belching knot of digital guts, this everywhere machine. This shitty 
void. There is a peril to life and limb from unguarded machinery;
blood collects. On the factory floor, already slick with the oil of 
wanting to burn clean the pink wires and calcified promises of 
severance. And drink the fluid from between vertebrae. At twenty-
two I crushed the cartilage in my spine from lifting electric grills 
above my head. I developed the arthritic stoop of exploitation, 
my young body malleable enough to bend to the contours of abuse. 
If we come from ribs let us pay back in kind the wet crack of 
steel toed amnesty into the hollow bones of asthmatic lungs
who wrote the book of the dead and drew a map.
For $16 an hour in California I bleached my future for the sexless 
dreams of laminated mechanisms pumping plastic into the ripe 
glands of belief and squeezing out piss freckled alimony – payoffs
that add up to the absent flattening of our stalagmitic suffering; 
collecting enough hardness to split the flaccid ribs of team-building 
exercises and right-to-work laws. The line connecting the leisured
breakdown of supple joints with the recycled amniotic fluid of
cheap denim made from labor distilled into poverty vodka: who
wrote the book of the dead and drew a map to San Francisco?