"What Work Is"

I am sitting at my computer late in the evening
staring at the glowing screen and the mocking
blink of the cursor, daring me to write.
But I’m unsteady tonight, as if the words prefer
to stay jumbled in my head instead of
coming out to play upon the paper and form
a poem about what work is.
I want to write about my experiences,
like how I worked in Fantasy Land
in the kitchen of Pinocchio’s Village Haus.
I want to talk about how fun it was,
how much I hated it and how I despised
climbing the ladder at the end of the night
and scrubbing the black grease out of the hood.
I should probably talk about how I worked
in a steakhouse buffet, where nobody tipped
because you didn’t do any work they said.
But to them I would reply, I carried 12 plates
that they filled with food and then left for me
to carry away and dump because their eyes
were as big as their wallets were tight.
Talking about my summer job would be nice,
how they threw me a party and took me out
because they were sad to see me go.
But none of that will form poetically on my page,
instead I just stare at my screen realizing
that writing poetry is a lot of work.

October 24, 2002