Tag Archives: work

June 30, 2009

business closing, fire sale

there is a fire ready to go here
where the sign reads
“building for lease, business zoned,
great location.”

here’s the tinder:

a manager’s Audi TT
in a parking lot full
of old pickups and beat vans.
the receiving dock empty.
the shipping dock empty.
fifteen minutes between phone calls.

and the sparks:
the few who are left
are still unpacking, testing,
repacking.

a time clock
marks the quiet.

when the last workbench is clear,

here comes the smolder
as they lock the doors
behind them when they leave,
looking around at each other.

later, the blaze:
at night,
in bars and homes,
bursting forth
full force:
danger
and hot fear.

the building is intact;
the people, embers.

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June 24, 2009

When he hit the ground
after his undignified flight,
with his feet wrenched to one side
and his head surprisingly
unhurt despite the angle of the fall,
his first thought was of all he had to do that day
and of how feared being seen as inadequate
if he was unable to do it.

So he got in the car
and went to work.
He limped into the building at eight
and figured it would be okay
as long as he stayed off his feet.

By ten o’clock, his leg was fine
but the pain in his back had begun
to bubble and throb. He could feel
a curve in his spine that wasn’t there before,
a gentle, sinister arch
two inches to the left
of the normal line,
and whether it was real or not

the pain of holding himself up
began to play his head for pity.
He ground his teeth and managed a smile
while doing what he had to do

to keep himself upright,
to get things done,
to fight past his agony
and look like a productive member
of this workforce…

in other words,
to do the same thing he did
every day.

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June 14, 2009

Make It Work

By Tony Brown

If you want
things to change,
learn to call them by names
other than exploitation and oppression.
Get yourself far away
from the slogans on TV
and radio, from your books and your blogs.

Go to work
in a factory
making beige mayonnaise
in vats alongside brown people
who don’t care if they never touch the stuff again
because they know too much
about how it’s made, but they still
have picnics and if the kid wants mayo,
the kid gets mayo.

Sweat your ass off in a card room,
combing raw wool into cloud fiber rolls
awaiting spinning and warping into tough cloth.
Notice how every card room worker is a shirtless father
actually looking forward to pushing through 100-degree overtime heat
in the sweaty bowels of the ancient mill,
and how every spinner toiling upstairs from them
is a tired mother who may be stained in stink
and dust but who carefully applies makeup
before work and touches it up at every break.

Go live on a cubicle farm
and discover that the analysts and auditors
don’t all wish they were artists
while they’re mashing the keys of their computers
and that some of them even enjoy it, or at the very least
they enjoy what the effort brings them.

On the street there are some people
who chose that rootless life over
some other hell, and others who admittedly
would be anywhere else if they could
but believe this is all only temporary
until they find a foothold somewhere
that’ll get them back into the grind you deplore.
Many of them fought for the country
that put them out there, but they’ll still
fight you to the death
if you say a word against it.

No, you think, this isn’t right,
it’s not the way it’s supposed to be —

but it is. It’s not that the shackles don’t exist
and that they don’t hurt. But for so many
a job’s a job and a call to duty is all it takes
to extract a salute. Sometimes, a means to an end
is just that, and “the end justifies the means”
is for some not a horrid phrase to justify evil,
it’s just the way things are
and have always been
and are always likely to be.
Tell yourself whatever you want
about how it’s all a big scam
but don’t you dare call them “stupid”
when they’re the ones who have to figure out
a way to make it all work
while you brood over the big, big words.

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Leave a comment | tags: poems, poetry, populism, work | posted in poetry