Eat, Sleep, Repeat

How to live

It's played out like instructions

One day follows the next

Continuously

Stuck in a loop

Like a mouse wheel

Or a noose

Getting nowhere but here

I must be insane

Doing the same thing over and over

And everyday hoping for something new

I write words to escape, to deviate

To be heard in the herd

The cattle that escapes the slaughter

That lives

I cannot help but feel

That everything I have done to this point 

Is trivial at best

I am searching for a talent that doesn't exist

I would have known it long ago if it had

Wearing a mature face, but I still have not grown up

I'm living in a fantasy

Thinking even for a second that I can escape

Believing I can avoid becoming the old lady at the grocery store

Never talking, never smiling, her face distorted in time

The old man at the diner, who comes back every morning

Orders the same thing and still hesitates to eat, fearing he already knows

How it tastes

I can't accept the fact I'm doomed to the life of a small town

That has been dying since my grandmother was born

I'm a fool for wanting more

Thinking I could escape the rip tide

Having the audacity, the delusion to believe

That I was born for more than this

I know I'll become lost in the corn fields,

In the old chair, in the cigarette, in the whiskey bottle

It is my heritage, my legacy

Put out in front of me like a road, and chasms on either side

What a fool

I see peers around me with twice the talent, 

And not even half the strife of me

And I envy them, they have grown wings

And will fly away leaving me here

To follow my instructions

Wake, work, sleep, wake, work, sleep

Until your hands fail, then your legs, then your mind

Until they lower you into the ground and put a stone over you

Until the words fade away, and everyone forgets

Then the cycles is done with you, and there is nothing left

The wheel stops turning, the noose closes tight