The wooden ties are covered in cereal box confetti, Corn Flakes and Fruit Loops, their shredded box fibres, a part of a balanced breakfast, loitering like train hoppers in a freight yard waiting to catch the next box car freighter headed out of this industrial landscape and back out to the prairies and mountains, over rivers and past lakes, to somewhere far beyond the promise of happy families in Kellog's commercials, and to someplace where the milk flows like waterfalls over Frosted Flakes, where the hurt stops, where there is a balance, if only for a moment.

Out here, I am nothing but pulp, an oozing shapeless mass dripping down the storm drain, looking for a current to take me to the sea, to carry me somewhere on windless sails that promise wholeness within the vastness of the oceans deep, to a place where I am not one, and instead one with creation, removed from myself, relieved of my ego, connected to the flow of all things, to be remade, to have eternal purpose, to be wheat, to not be fed, but to feed.

The boss man watches from the windows; the dead office plants lick with their leaves the condensation of the dripping office air conditioner, the keyboards clatter, the water machine gurgles and burps today's take-out lunch, the pink gluey Pepto lingering at the back of my throat, the aftertaste of heartburn and regret waiting for my turn in the one toilet stall, emptying the contents of my capitalist diet into the bowl like the guy before me, burning my anus with the cheap one-ply toilet paper. At the same time, I move a pallet of sweet three-ply Cashmere from the warehouse to the loading dock, my eyes watching the bathroom door, my stomach counting the minutes on its doomsday clock, the boss man watching me with the second's hand on his Tissot watch.

Sometimes, I find fragments of notes between the crushed boxes, steel straps, and torn papers fluttering around the bale yard, small cyphers, tiny hints of forgotten details, half-solved equations, maybe a phone number, part of a shopping list, and other times something that reads like this: It's been seventeen years, and I'm still working this dead-end job, I said I'd quit at thirty, and now I'm thirty-seven, I hate it here, no raise, no respect, no future, just paycheque after paycheque while I watch the world burning, every cent buying less, every hour working me harder as I grow older, I'm trapped in an endless loop of mediocrity. There is no shame in working a simple job, I tell myself as my joints ache and my dreams slip away, as I become apathetic to my own existence, caring less and less to take a chance, any chance, because what if it all comes back to this, what if...? And that's as far as I can ever get before loading up the bale and dropping it into the shredder, holding back my tears, my body shaking with grief and the vibrations of the machines, my trembling heart masked by the deafening noise of industry and the solemn downward gaze of my fellow workers, as they read their own messages on the brown billboards of broken men and women, all of them dropping their bales into the shredders at the same line, unable like me to bear the burden of "what if."