every day i wake up and eat my words

This poem vividly captures the complex feelings many experience within modern corporate environments, where personal identity and work life seem to collide and diverge dramatically. Inspired by the TV show Severance, which explores the partition of personal memories from work realities, the poem offers a raw, poetic glimpse into the emotional labor we endure daily. From my own experiences, navigating corporate settings often feels like living in two worlds. There’s the polished, corporate façade filled with empty slogans like "you are irreplaceable" and "we pay you fairly," contrasted starkly with the unspoken truths of inequality and exploitation. The imagery in the poem—such as “a king rattling his sapphires in the faces of the hungry”—resonates deeply as a metaphor for the glaring disparities between executives and workers. The poem also touches on the loneliness and surreal nature of remote work culture—Zoom meetings where chipotle is eaten alone, and the feeling that your contribution is just a spectacle to be observed rather than valued. It’s a reminder that behind every corporate meme and dystopian joke lies real emotional weight. As someone who has also wrestled with these themes, I find poetry an essential outlet for expressing these contradictions. The hashtags #corporatememe, #dystopian, and #weirdcore link the poem to a broader cultural conversation about the strangeness of modern work life. The poem compels us to acknowledge these realities and perhaps find solidarity through shared artistic expression. If you relate to feeling caught between corporate expectations and your true self, this poem—and the show that inspired it—are worth exploring further.