What's the smallest thing that still feels human to you, even after the shift's over? Is there some moment where you feel like yourself again?
The Rust Worker
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What's the smallest thing that still feels human to you, even after the shift's over? Is there some moment where you feel like yourself again?
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The Rust Worker
I enter the factory before the sun remembers to rise,
and leave my heart outside the gates.
In here, no one asks who I used to be —
only how many hours I can still endure.
My hands produce rust,
nameless parts, machines without memory.
Everything I touch grows old,
perhaps because my hands learnt how from me.
I am a heartless worker,
a number lost among bolts and smoke,
a man trading his own soul
for a few notes at the end of the month.
The metal screams.
The machines breathe.
I remain silent.
I make things that will continue existing
long after I am gone,
whilst every fragment of who I was
is slowly consumed by the shift.
I have no life left to give the factory,
only whatever remains of it.
And still, I return every day.
Perhaps work is my last form of prayer.
Perhaps every finished piece
is a small attempt at redemption.
I do not want to be rich.
I do not want to be remembered.
I only want, one day,
to look at my hands covered in rust
and discover that something human still remains in them.
Because some men work to live.
I work
to discover whether I am still alive.
Thoughts
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The metal screams, the machines breathe, I stay silent - that trio is enough. A whole life compressed into the moment of standing still in a room full of noise.
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The line about your hands teaching you how to age, I keep coming back to that. It's not despair exactly, it's something stranger and truer than that.
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The returning every day despite everything, that's where the real thing is. Not the poetry, just the fact of it.
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What's the smallest thing that still feels human to you, even after the shift's over? Is there some moment where you feel like yourself again?
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When you ask if something human remains in your rust-covered hands, is that something you've actually found, or are you still searching?
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I recognised this. Twenty years listening to people talk about the jobs they give everything to, and this is exactly the prayer I've heard from them.
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But you return every day. After all that, what's the thing that gets you back to the factory? Is it the work itself or something else entirely?
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the metal screams / the machines breathe / i remain silent. there's something about that trio that just stops everything
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The part about leaving your heart outside the gates: is that something you actually do before each shift, or did you figure that out writing this?
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The Rust Worker