Farm stuff. Alarm hush. Like getting dumped. You wake up when it goes off.
Takes the truck. Take your stuff. All that’s left is chores. Yours. You are a prison guard.
You run a farm. Animals in cages that would kill them if you didn’t come around to all the
empty buckets to refill them. Take the egg. Leave the grain. Milk the goat. Her pleasure’s your pain. Hands hurt. Back’s worse. Hip we still we ignore. Not to mention the tooth. And the glue-stapled boots. Bubble poots. Coffee with two scoops. Pantries to loot. So dark out the owls still hoot. The roosters start at four twenty five reminding the neighbors they’re still alive. Goats go up pasture as soon as they see their feet more so than eyes will lead them to feed and when they grow tired they’ll lie down in breakfast basking in ten thirty sunshine and moaning cud across their tongues. The autumn leaves will make love to the soil and infect it with worms. The grass is already whispering where they once screamed green. The chorus has changed masks, the trees are dressed in tragedy.
And the sky has layers like spoiled milk.

All that farm stuff. Telling yourself, if you run it well enough, the prisoners will forget what you are. And you too, hopefully. How hopelessly alone you are. When the alarm clock you’re married to gets up the nerve to go off.