I jog every morning
through a business park here
those metal boxes with windows like blank eyes —
I think about my father
not because he worked in one.
he didn’t.
but they sound like him
quiet on the inside.
they’re empty,
no voices, no motion.
just dust and a loading dock —
life gets dropped off there,
and shipped out the back.
he was a custodian-
swept up after crack babies
wiped their walls clean
of their vulgar noise
he was home most nights,
sat in front of the tv
like he was practicing being a ghost.
never warning me
of the grim life ahead
I clocked in, clocked out,
eaten alive by fluorescent lights and Monday mornings.
felt the same thing moving into my chest —
a quiet kind of cancer.
not the killing kind.
just the kind that steals your name.
these buildings, they don’t say “work.”
they say rot.
they say hand-me-down despair.
just shrines to repetition,
to never getting out.
and maybe that’s why I run.
not to lose weight.
not to live longer.
I run to dodge the bloodline.
I run like hell to stay just ahead
of becoming another man
who dies standing in place.
