Standard Of Living

Every morning,

you are gifted a death sentence in installments —

nearly a hundred thousand seconds

wired into your bloodstream

like time is a loan shark

and breath, borrowed collateral.

You inject it

into conversations that echo back nothing

but rehearsed pleasantries

from people fluent in pretending.

You waste it

on rituals called routines,

on altar clocks,

on surviving —

as if being were a crime.

You call it a life.

It calls your bluff.

You grind your spine into gravel

for jobs that devour your name,

mortgages that inherit you,

titles that forget you,

names you answer to

that were never yours to begin with.

You auction your purpose

to systems built to collapse.

You chase divinity

in polished accents and inflated paychecks.

You pray to Mondays

and resurrect for rent.

You don’t run out of time.

You hemorrhage it —

through obligations dressed as duty,

through distractions sold as pleasure,

through the hollow between

what you wanted

and what they told you to want.

You drown

in decisions made by dead men.

You confuse exhaustion for meaning,

sedation for peace,

repetition for identity.

You honeymoon with delusion,

divorce your reflection,

raise a family

of what-ifs and should-have-beens.

And still,

you set alarms

for mornings you dread,

call decay discipline,

call obedience ambition.

You don’t wake up.

You reset.

You repaint the cage.

You sync yourself to the scream

you’ve forgotten how to voice.

No angels.

No ascension.

Just another withdrawal

from the only account

you never check —

while you hoard currency

you can save,

and spend time

you never get back.

Because once you’re bankrupt of breath,

your savings aren’t yours.

Just loose change

in someone else’s eulogy.