Posts for June 20, 2022 (page 6)

I went there,

just down the block from where she’d lived for,

well,

almost the whole time I knew her.

Wasn’t easy, but I did it.

They’d asked me to read one of her poems

– that’d be the easy part –

and maybe say a word or two

– that’d be the hard part.

Like I said,

it wasn’t easy, but I did it.

All I had to do was put her poems in my pocket

– that’d be the easy part –

take a shortish bus ride down to town

and,

with those pieces of the past in my pocket,

walk through the present,

by which I mean

the gentrified,

totally flipped,

boutiqued,

white folks’ heaven of a lived-in destination

that keeps on marching around

like some kind of

newfangled

palace guard

in the place where her

so preciously affordable and oh-so-vibrantly diversified

neighborhood

used to stand on the corner and smile

– that’d be the hard part.

Wasn’t easy, but I did it.

Sat,

listened some,

scribbled some,

walked to the stage,

pulled

the past-that-I-still-wished-would-be-our-future

out of my pocket,

unfolded it,

and read for a bit

– that’d be the easy part –

and then I took the present out,

as if it were some kind of

unlicensed,

untrained,

uninsured,

but trust-me-it’s-totally-legal

concealed carry of a flagrantly tossed-off poem.

Yep,

the one I’d rudely written while other folx were reading

– that’d be the hard part

‘cause I don’t like it when I‘m rude –

and this

is what I read,

“In another time and place

but in-this-room-this-very-room,

Roscoe Morgan,

Senior,

quit pickin’ in the middle of a song,

brought his right hand to his mouth

as if

by accident

he had spit the lyrics out between his teeth

and was stuffing them back in.

Rubbed that hand across his upper lip.

Looked at it.

Then

‘Sorry, folks,’ he said,

‘thought my nose was bleedin’,

but it snot.’”

And then

“Oh, Aralee,”

I said,

“I miss this neighborhood almost as much as I miss you,

especially when I’m in it.”

Me

i
am
the
poet
of
all
i
feel
&
every
image
of
the
sum
total
of every-
thing
under
heaven
i
dare
word
upon
the
naked
page

I.

He was old ten minutes after his birth.
She was never young until the second she died.
They stood their screaming but were not heard.
And You didn’t stand a chance.  

II.

The faint chuckling from fate lingers in the lower frequencies.  

Around 5hz.  

The same frequency earthquakes operate on.  

III.  

The fates spin.
The fates measure.
The fates shear. 

Is suicide the act of an automaton?  

Past created.
Present fated.
Future abated.  

Or is it the only instance of free will? 

A drop followed by a sudden stop—
The hanged man.  

No different than the fated man
at the end of his rope.

Mr. McGregor’s garden is first on our list.

except the idiot is a multi-million dollar logistics program
designed to streamline the work in the warehouse
so that all the most important tasks are done first
but it was rolled out too fast. Bugs never worked out
were left to infest and infect the whole building.
Now it speaks only one language
which is not mine, or anybody else’s, trying to use it.

2.
Is math hard?

The monitor aboard the forklift instructs me
to pull down a pallet from thirty-five feet in the air
to load twenty boxes in a slot
that can physically hold only five.
I loaded those five, now it wants the remaining fifteen.
I told it no a few minutes ago
and I’m telling it no now.
In a few minutes, I’ll tell it no again
all in fear of the dreaded
FATAL ERROR! CONTACT ADMIN FOR ASSISTANCE!

3.
The whole place is a mess. Its bullshit stinks
worse than the toxic swamp of a job I just escaped.
I can only stand it because it’s still better than being personally attacked.
Still one wonders how long they can put up with such a difficult environment.

4.
Now the system only wants me to load five boxes
where I can fit thirty
and there’s no way to convince it to let me load more in.
Tell me what’s more efficient:
to pull a pallet down once for thirty boxes
or six separate times for five boxes per drop?

5.
However, this is only my experience with the problem.
I see it reflected in the faces of everyone else
moving ever slower as the week goes on
under the burden of such a flawed system.
They are dead-souled, like I was
in the final days of my last job,
when my rage was barely kept together
behind a face always trying to smile.

These people tell me stories of the old system,
a better system.
A system that never crashed.
A system that gave them control.

A system that could count.

6.
This one’s probably my favorite.
I load ten of a possible twenty boxes into the slot,
then the system tells me to put that pallet up,
pull a second pallet down of the same product
to load the other ten.

But I already have this pall-
just let me-
ugh!

So I try to manipulate the system back to the first pallet
because that’s what would make sense, right?
But then I get hit with that dreaded
FATAL ERROR: CONTACT ADMIN FOR ASSISTANCE!

7.
It all hearkens back to an interview question.
I can beat the inanimate object
and this system, though complex, is no different.
If I can tap into the logic behind the flaws
maybe I can start figuring out some of the kinks.

Then again, I was warned about this system in that interview,
through onboarding, through orientation,
my first day on the floor,and my first time working with it,
almost like everyone was trying to scare me away.

Makes me think.
Like, if we know about all these problems,
why are people still dragging their feet,
squandering their lives
trying to force it to work?

8.
Then somebody mentions the names management can become
by getting the best of this experiment.
Somebody mentions the money poured in.
Somebody mentions they were so eager to satisfy their money,
they rolled out the system
before determining how many boxes a slot could physically hold,
before obtaining accurate inventory numbers,
before teaching it how to count.

Now, it dawns on me.
We have become nothing more
than a people imprisoned by corporate pride
and greed
and the disconnect
between idealizing leadership
and reality’s foot-soldiers.

I understand the pull of her swirling
hair & why it’s her waist your hand
wants to entwine. I understand
that her aventurine eyes sweep
over you like the Caribbean
surf.  I understand why
you forget about other loves, forget
about me. Now I am a crushed
monarch under an 18-
wheeler. A girl who always
goes back out to sea. I am
the moon going down. I shouldn’t
have let you do it. I am a girl
who sings a poem of endless water.

I don’t like the first thing
I remember:  you telling my husband-to-be
you could not imagine why
anyone would want to marry me.
I would rather remember  

the summer when you and I
would wake first
head out with your Leica
for lessons on lightmeters,
f-stops and shutter speed.  

You were impressed by my skills
in trig and calculus but not
my crossing lines.  I think it made you
nervous.   You were king,
the rest of us  (all females)  

were first of all to be pretty  
(whatever it took), to be sweet, helpful,
to listen, to do and be whatever
others expected.      That thinking
for myself business –  not wife material.   

I’ve been watched, while a kid,
By my parents who worried
I’d eat thumbtacks
Or fall off a cliff.
I’ve been watched, carefully,
By a cop once or twice
As I left from a bar
Walking stiff.
But I’ve never been watched
With such skeptical eyes
Tying shoes in my
Own habitat
As I’ve been in the months since
We opened our home
To a quite large, but slim-
Focused cat.

You stopped making up stories
                                      about why people are
                     the way they are  

You let people be
                   people
                        and appreciated them
               for all of who they are  

What if when you are
       walking,
                thinking,
                         talking,
                              eating
       you simply
                    walk,
                          think,
                                 talk,
                                    eat
without judging how others do it  

What if you lived who you are
                                             FULL OUT, no apologies,
who would you be then  

Let go the judge
let go the jury
let go the executioner

Banish them to dust heap of your mind  

                      Bring forth the lover
Bring forth the kindhearted soul
                      Bring forth the compassionate friend

No more guys lying in trenches
bellies in mud.
Now it’s restricted air space,
assaults on internatonal banking,
going after the yachts of oligarchs.
I feel like I’ve seen an age come
and go.  Smiling family pictures
of Zelensky complete with whimsical
face paint, demonization of Putin,
shirtless on a horse.

This is all good I guess for democracy,
even Sweden and Finland taking sides.
We’ll do a cleaner economc war
with economic sanctions.  Wars
can be done in a different way.
Even so, still there’s blood.