Robert M Foley

WAKE

In this sterile dawn,
light arrives
as an interrogation,
each ray a rigid line,
drawn with bureaucratic precision
across a floor scrubbed
clean of dissent.
My eyelids are leaden curtains
desperate to block out
the grey reality,
a stagnant air
thick with the unsaid,
the forbidden,
the heavy weight
of an enforced, artificial peace.

To wake
is to don a costume of compliance,
to learn the new,
necessary language of the regime,
a daily betrayal
of the dreaming self,
the one that still remembers
the color blue outside
a file or flag
or world we once knew
that a child never will.
The mirror reflects a stranger,
a cog,
a single, insignificant number
in a vast, grey machine.

I hate this waking,
this daily resurrection
into a dying world.
I long for the oblivion of night,
where thoughts run free
in the shadows
of the mind’s untamed lands.
But the light strengthens
as the boots march on,
synchronized,
inevitable,
a metronome for the march
of uniformity.
The sound vibrates
through my bones, urging me
to rise,
to conform,
to put on the mandated face
a waking act of submission,
the signing of a social contract
I never agreed to,
forced to begin
another day
of being less human.