go ahead, waste more of my fucking time
because we all have so much of it to spare
futility
impatience
the desperate need to keep up
to keep pace
it’s in all of us
the tap, tap, tap of fingers
on a counter top
of a service desk
making demands of a person
whose time is valued even less than yours
go ahead, waste more of my fucking time
bulging, throbbing, twitching
veins
in a sweating forehead
a tongue lashing for someone
who surely doesn’t deserve it
spit it, spit the anger out
everywhere
because everyone’s time
is so…damn…precious…
and yet some people remain content,
are happy going slow
I wish I could know
the serenity of sitting around
at ease
of smelling roses, feeling
the calm breeze
scratching your ass
in a waiting room while eating
a donut
stop wasting my fucking time!
it should be the motto of the human race
animals hell bent
on wasting everything anyway
so what’s the big tragedy
with all this wasted time?
we don’t own time, man
it’s not ours to waste —
time wastes us
“Time is an invention and nothing else.” -Henri Bergson
Garbage Notes:
Everyone’s time is valuable. I don’t think anyone would argue with that statement. But in practice we see that things are much different.
Just think about all the shopping carts that are going to be abandoned in the parking lot at the mall this holiday season. Or all the garbage thrown onto the floor at the movie theatre. Or what happens when you send your food back for the third time at a restaurant because it isn’t perfect.
Think of all the people whose jobs will take infinitely longer because you care more about your time than theirs.
Would you so casually waste the time of the people you look up to? Would you waste your professor’s time when office hours are over? Or when your psychiatrist says time’s up, would you keep your ass planted in the chair? Would you even dare to steal an extra moment of your lawyer’s time?
Or let’s say you get the chance to meet someone famous, like some really-huge- fucking-deal of a celebrity, someone who you know makes exponentially more money than you do. How careless would you be with their time? Sure, you might ask for a quick selfie, but you certainly wouldn’t be yanking them around for too long.
We take it as a given that it’s okay to pay people differently for their services. Fine, this is what our society does. It’s capitalism. Free market, blah blah blah. We all get that. I mean, there are so many logical reasons to justify why the time it takes to do one particular thing is more valuable than the time it takes to do another. But do we need to let this kind of thinking spill over into our everyday interactions with people?
If this poem is about one thing, it’s about that moment in everyday life when a person of higher-status interfaces with a person of lower-status. What’s the dynamic that plays out? What’s the body language? What’s the verbal exchange like? Who is quicker to anger or get frustrated? Who takes longer to respond? Who acts more entitled or intimidated?
Think about it—how do you treat that person at the front desk when you know they won’t be getting a moment’s peace for the next eight hours? Meanwhile you’re actually rushing them because you’re gonna be late for your nail appointment. How do you treat that barista in the drive-thru who maybe took a little too long to make your matcha latte, when you know they’re barely going to have enough time to feed their kids tonight?
Why is it that you’ll spend thousands of dollars to sit front row at the Taylor Swift concert or to go see LeBron James throw a ball through a hole, and yet you won’t drop five bucks to support your favorite poet whose hard work you’ve been reading for free for about the twentieth time? Okay, you may be able to see through my motives on this last point… But you get what I’m saying here!
We live in an unfair and imbalanced world. And while the philosophers say time is an invention and the psychologists say time is all relative and the self-help gurus tell us it’s all what we make of it, I’m telling you that time is fucking precious, to EVERYONE.
So be as careful about wasting other people’s time as you would be about wasting your own. Because as the last line of my poem says—in the end, time indeed wastes us, and it does so without prejudice. Time is an equal opportunity destroyer.
Franco Amati 2023
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omg do not upset the Swifties!
Boy oh boy, having personally worked in the service industry I can really relate to this part: "it’s in all of us
the tap, tap, tap of fingers
on a counter top
of a service desk
making demands of a person
whose time is valued even less than yours" You capture the plight and the frustration so well in your poem. Thank you for seeing us!