Ten thousand mornings I pedal through shifting countryside, the leaves are partying the leaves are ruined corpses, the sun bellows or the sky dangles bruised, traffic streams like laser beams through waltzing litter, and telephone poles sprout layered shells of posters while my beard grows like dough pushed through holes—but the road never wavers, escorting me through wild dark glory of storm or high heat’s eerie windlessness to the logistics warehouse, where they have mastered time and fed it into its own end, where it’s always the same day with same sayings and same boxes stacked, where we pound clocks, dream into plastic bags and cut ourselves to fit the conveyor belt, and those who function long and hard enough are crowned, to stride, snap whips and snipe, to repeat days till they’re sixty-five or death do them part, like one, barely fifty, who complained to me of heat and coughed, snagged a box, flushed and lay down on the concrete, his heart splitting, Alexei, who spent his last moments staring at steel rafters, or past them. The conveyor belt never stopped.