Wake up and haul it out of bed before the sun shows up,
pour the coffee, black and bitter, in a chipped and faded cup,
the alarm went off at five-fifteen, the same as every day,
and the body does its duty ’cause the body gets no say.
Throw the boots on, lace ’em tight, the truck won’t start itself,
grab the jacket off the hook and leave the feeling on the shelf,
the road is dark and empty and the shift is eight hours long,
and a man just keeps on moving ’cause a man has to belong.
Punch the clock, punch the clock, let the hours do their thing,
punch the clock, punch the clock, in the fall and in the spring,
don’t expect a damn thing back for what you put in every day,
punch the clock, punch the clock, and watch your life just drain away.
The foreman’s got a clipboard and a face like hammered tin,
the same instructions every shift, where to start and where to begin,
the machine does what it’s told to do and so does the man who runs it,
and the difference between the two of them gets smaller if you study it.
Lunch break by the loading dock, a sandwich and some quiet,
the other guys talk football ’cause there’s nothing else to try it,
and a man just nods and chews his food and watches the concrete grey,
’cause conversation costs a kind of energy he can’t afford to pay.
The afternoon drags heavy like a boot stuck in the mud,
and the clock on the wall is moving through something thick as blood,
but the hands will get to quitting time the way they always do,
and a man just keeps his head down ’cause there’s nothing else to do.
Drive home in the same traffic with the same damn talk on the air,
the same politics, the same noise, and nobody anywhere
is saying anything worth hearing and the dial doesn’t help,
so he cuts the radio off and drives the rest of it himself.
The couch receives him like a sentence at the end of a long day,
the television fills the room with noise but not a thing to say,
he eats whatever’s in the fridge and doesn’t taste a bite,
and the clock on the kitchen wall just counts him down to night.
He doesn’t hate the living, doesn’t love it either much,
it’s just a thing that keeps on happening without the benefit of touch —
the alarm will go at five-fifteen, the boots will hit the floor,
and the man will do it all again, same as the time before.
He’s been running on this treadmill for eleven years and counting,
and the years don’t feel like anything — no crashing and no mounting
of the tension toward some breaking point or peak or revelation —
just the steady-state mechanics of a man in occupation.
On the rare occasions when a thought breaks through the layer
of routine and lands against him like an unexpected prayer,
he considers it a moment and then puts it back away —
and punches back the clock and does the clockwork of the day.
The paycheck clears on the same date, the bills get paid on time,
the car gets its oil changed and the house gets by and the dime
goes where the dime is supposed to go in the managed, metered life —
and nobody asks what’s left when you subtract the work and the wife.
Because the wife stopped asking when the asking stopped returning,
and the work fills in the silence and the silence kills the burning,
and the burning was what kept him up at thirty-two and three —
now at forty-five he sleeps just fine, no burning bothering.
Punch the clock, keep the engine running low,
punch the clock till there ain’t nowhere left to go.