Some few nights in the store-keeper’s hut – tin roof and walls
-scarce thirty yards from where the twelve head battery’s crushing feet
pounded and crushed the snarling ore to floating slime
he could not sleep but quivered and shook with the earth and air.
His ears inured to the years began of ordered days –
to sleep, to eat, to work, working, eating, sleeping
with week-end variations of booze and sport and sex,
and he was quite content. Until one sky-pressed night
he woke, dark terror in his throat, around him and about
a chilling quiet. The battery was dead, cocooned in silence
and he upon his narrow bunk darkness his cerement
he too was dead, was dead but yet alive –
waiting … waiting … waiting….