William Ward Butler's "Logistics"

Thoughts on the realization of one's isolation.

Logistics

We were young sharks, boxcutters at our hips,
we worked overtime shifts, took ten-minute
nicotine breaks, quick hits, joked about buying

a guillotine for the boss as a Christmas present.
That winter was the worst for us, orders piling up,
a non-zero amount of blood allowed in the packages—

we all joked about dying young, DUIs among us
like a bouquet of orchids. Pablo would be in prison
in a year’s time. Most of us will have quit by then.

Back then, we were content to clock out and in,
rhythm and myth of what is called unskilled labor,
golden hours spent talking who else could do

what we’re doing, wondering if robots would take this
job too, not that we wanted to keep it, but we all had
rent to pay—some days, it didn’t feel like a bad gig.

I dreamed of sabotage (grabbing the PA, shouting
stop work now) but that was selfish;
I couldn’t keep myself from wanting a war

whenever the cause was just. I knew I had to leave
when I emerged from a sixty-hour week, saw all
the people outside, and thought, civilians.


first published in Bear Review (Vol. 11.2, link here)

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I read this poem for the first time maybe a month ago. I don’t know how I came across it, sifting as I sometimes do between online journals, following the names of poets I admire across the internet. But I came across it, and I read it, and man—I held my breath the whole time. Sometimes a poem does that, right from the jump. You begin to read it, and you feel the music of it, the tautness of construction, this attempt, as poetry sometimes is, to build some kind of structure for the soul, whether house or highway, something to hold it or move it along or both at once.

The music of this poem sings throughout. Just, immediately. You can hear it. It’s here:

boxcutters at our hips...overtime shifts...quick hits

And here:

worst for us...orders piling up...non-zero amount of blood

And here:

Back then...content...out and in

And, finally, here:

rhythm and myth

Throughout, throughout, throughout, there is this music that sings electric through this poem. It’s not just in these slant rhymes and echoing sounds. It’s there, too, in this punchy, staccato rhythm—lines serrated with commas, longer, mid-sentence descriptions (“DUIs among us / like a bouquet of orchids”) giving way to shorter, more determined standalone sentences (“Pablo would be in prison / in a year’s time”). This presence of music, as both rhythm and rhyme, is a special thing, I think, given what this poem speaks to, which is to say the loss of one’s life, the loss of one’s sense of self, in a world of increased efficiency and consumerism and scale and so much more. The poem’s music—which is a thing we can make out of language but only when we choose to make it out of language—is one way that it reminds you, even as it details how a kind of indignant labor can rob someone of their selfhood, that its speaker is alive. To notice it, too, as you read it—this means that you are alive, too.

And so, it was music that I was drawn to when I read this poem. But it was not music alone. I was drawn to the breadth of this poem, the way it welcomes humanity without judgement, this wide-framed allowance of all-ness, this insistence that people can be more than a single belief, or one way of being. The characters in this poem are at once “young sharks” and bouquets of flowers. They contain the threat of violence, however justified, and also the deep capacity for wonder. They have a sense of pride (“who else could do / what we’re doing”) and a grim kind of acceptance (“some days, it didn’t feel like a bad gig”), even in a place that does not care for them, a place where they must move so fast, and with such dexterity, and with the threat of such pain, that the presence of blood is not an anomaly, but something that has already been accounted for by those with power.

It is the ending of this poem, though, that really stilled me. And still does. Here it is:

I knew I had to leave
when I emerged from a sixty-hour week, saw all
the people outside, and thought, civilians.

My gosh. I don’t know if I have read anything that so sharply, so stunningly, and so brutally captures the loss at the heart of our society today—the loss of individual selfhood and the loss of a deeper connection between ourselves. It is that loss that this poem gives voice to. Here, in these lines, that loss is presented as a realization: the speaker of this poem realizes—with profound clarity—that their labor has eroded their sense of belonging to this world, and has eroded, too, their sense of connection with others. There is a real loneliness here, and a real shattering. The speaker emerges from a place of dehumanizing labor, having become a kind of machine, and sees other people as distant from him, as civilians rather than, say, people, which means, too, that he no longer sees himself as a kind of self. Or perhaps it is not those he sees that he fails to recognize as people, but rather his own body that he fails to understand as human. The soul ripped out of the self. The self ripped out of the world. A wildly painful and awful dislocation. A dislocation that happens every day. It is happening right now.

It is fitting and powerful that the ending of this poem is an ending whose realization has something to do with language. Call this one more innumerable reason why something like poetry matters in a real, tangible way: it reminds me that language is both one of the places where our most fulfilling relationships with the world begin, and also one of the places where our most vicious and cruel breakdowns within the world take root. Consider that word, civilians, and the weight it carries, especially now, in a time of absolutely shitty, unnecessary, awful war. Think of how frequently that word appears in times of structural, systemic violence. In the attempt to distinguish between those who are allowed to die and those who are not, a cruel form of accounting, the people who are not supposed to die are no longer written as people. They become civilians.

In the aftermath of the United States’ bombing of a school in Iran, those who died have so often been referred to as civilians. Here, in the transcript of a well-intentioned attempt to get to the root of that tragedy, is the opening description of that awful action:

But once we all realized what had happened, it was shocking. This was an elementary school blown up by a missile, and 175 civilians, mostly children, were killed. So I just want to talk for a moment about the scale of this.

It’s a sad fact that the word “civilians” comes before the word “children.” Whether well intentioned or not, this language offers an immediate distance. It makes actual witness close to impossible. This is one of the profound tragedies of any kind of war. Even out of an attempt to make sense of the scale of violence, the language which we use to calculate and record and transcribe the breadth of destruction is often language that places distance between the victims of atrocity and those who share a common humanity. This has happened so often, and with such frequency, that I would not be surprised if people hear the word civilian and don’t think immediately of: human, person, neighbor, mother, daughter, brother, father, son. Sometimes, our efforts to account for things make it harder for us to actually account for things.

This distance between us—between you and me, between you and someone else, between each of us, all of us, right now—seems to be growing every day. It is exacerbated in times of systemic violence, and such violence is not just limited to war. I think of this asinine quiz published in New York Times the other day, where readers can pick their preference between writing generated by artificial intelligence and writing generated by literal humans. What purpose does this serve, other than to alienate us? What joy does this offer me, other than the literal opposite of joy? Why should I care, in other words, about writing generated by a large language model that spends its seconds scouring the writing of non-large-language-models, which is to say small-fragile-mortal-language-artists, which is to say humans? I want to read the work of people who live and then wrestle with the fact that they will die. I want to read the work of people who are fickle and strange and inconsistent and odd and heartbroken and in love. To suggest anything otherwise, even as a game, is an act of idiocy. It pulls us apart. It begins and ends with language.

I think of this poem today and I feel deeply, deeply grateful for the reminder that we can all come to the realization that its speaker comes to at the poem’s end, which I’ll paste again below:

I knew I had to leave
when I emerged from a sixty-hour week, saw all
the people outside, and thought, civilians.

This world breaks us and divides us and hammers us over the head, in the midst of such breaking and such division, with promises of a more efficient day, a more productive mindset, a list that will end all lists, an app that will track your child’s sleep and optimize their nap time, often all for some monthly fee of $11.99, unless you want the premium, far more optimized version of that same list or that same app or that same program, for a few more dollars—let’s call it $14.99. And I get it, god, I do. Sometimes it is not really in our individual capacity to resist any of this, especially when, feeling broken by work in a country that does not guarantee one’s family leave or one’s healthcare, we long for something more productive, more efficient, for a day with one more hour of sleep. Man, I get it.

But look: to realize this is a beginning. To realize that so much of the world seeks to isolate each of us in our little cocoons of compartmentalized, algorithmic productivity and consumption. To simply realize it is a beginning. It is a first step. To say that you lost a shred of your empathy because of the mass-produced language of war. To say that you lost a bit of your patience because of the ease of the quick delivery. To say that you lost a bit of your own humanity because of the endlessness of the scroll. To say you can’t hear the music as well anymore. To say you don’t feel as moved by the bounding playfulness of dogs. To say you cannot seem to find, some days, where your care begins. To say you feel lost those days. Because it feels like you cannot find yourself. I am there with you. Let’s begin there so we do not end there. We can turn back around. Pick the book back up. Remind yourself of someone else, so you do not forget yourself.

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1. The brilliant poet Sarah Ghazal Ali posted this online. Please considering supporting her family (and the families of so many others) by joining a donor registry. You can do that here.

2. In the wake of the attacks on Iran, I recommend turning to this piece by Kaveh Akbar, written last year, worth revisiting over and over again, for as long as those with power wield violence and then manufacture our acceptance of such violence. I condemn it all. To allow for it is to allow for the worst: the strike against a girl’s school in Iran, the “record pace” of violence.

3. My novel, Pilgrims, is out in the world, and I am deeply grateful. Thank you for reading it and sharing it and all sorts of things. If you are interested, you can buy it here. Consider writing a review on Goodreads if you’d like. Consider asking for it from your local library. I appreciate it. Thank you a million times over.

4. The word ceasefire seems to be just a word. As news outlets report, Israel has violated the terms constantly, and, as the Gaza Sunbirds posted awhile ago, the language of ceasefire does not mean a language of peace, and, as Doctors Without Borders stated, it certainly does not mean that help is not needed. Consider donating to Doctors Without Borders here as they continue their work in Gaza. And please consider following and supporting the work of The Sameer Project (link here) and The Gaza Sunbirds (link here) as they provide on the ground support for Palestinians in Gaza.

5. If you’ve read any of the recent newsletters, you’ve perhaps noticed that I am offering a subscription option. This is functioning as a kind of “tip jar.” If you would like to offer your monetary support as a form of generosity, please consider becoming a paid subscriber below. There is no difference in what you receive as a free or paid subscriber; to choose the latter is simply an option to exercise your generosity if you feel willing. I am grateful for you either way. Thanks for your readership.