Work Song

This fastening, unfastening, and heaving—

this is our life. Whose life is it improving?

It topples some. Some others it will toughen.

Work is the safest way to fail, and often

the simplest way to love a son or daughter.

We come. We carp. We’re fired. We worry later.

That man is strange. His calipers are shiny.

His hands are black. For lunch he brings baloney,

and, offered coffee, answers, “Thank you, no.”

That man, with nothing evil left to do

and two small skills to stir some interest up,

fits in the curtained corner of a shop.

The best part of our life is disappearing

into the john to sneak a smoke, or staring

at screaming non-stop mills, our eyes unfocused,

or standing judging whose sick joke is sickest.

Yet nothing you could do could break our silence.

We are a check. Do not expect a balance.

That is a wrathful man becoming older,

a nobody like us, turned mortgage holder.

We stay until the bell. That man will stay

ten minutes more, so no one can complain.

Each day, by then, he’s done exactly ten.

Ten what, exactly, no one here can say.