Monday, August 2, 2021

Poverty Before Intelligence, or Accountants, Before Narration


 

Driving home from Maine the interstate mile markers count down, the zero of any north-south interstate at the southern end of the state, the zero of any east-west starts at the western end of the state, some states - Maine and Pennsylvania in my case - mark every fucking tenth of a mile every tenth of a mile every tenth of a mile every fucking tenth
We need to drive because Earthgirl paints and canvases take space and next year we're there two weeks, she needs two weeks, she just found her eye and hand past Friday, Saturday's are amazing, another week this year, today the first day of the second week, as I type this last evening we were in Seal Cove w sunset...
Me, strange, my spiritual damnlessness towards all I bark at but never achieve achieved this vacation in Seal Cove with Earthgirl and I like the void but I'm home from vacation tenth of a mile by tenth of a mile and am paid to give a damn about it starting 8:30 Monday morning, I guarantee Bookkeeper has found a receipt out of place or a form not properly filed and left it on my desk as a nasty welcome back, fuck, I feel enough of a damn stirring to need squelch daydreaming the devastating thank you for the welcome back no point in thinking since I'll never say it
Dear Bookkeeper, you imbecile, after driving twelve hours from Maine I drove down to Hilltop Sunday evening to retrieve items I will need to work from home tomorrow per your edict, since you're suddenly short-handed and don't know how to do any of our jobs yourself I was going to offer to work in the building tomorrow when I could be sleeping in after a twelve hour drive from Maine followed by three hours work in the office (this is true, Earthgirl can vouch) when I got your lovely welcome home card, your dumb bookkeeper ahas fucked you, you bookkeeper asshole bookkeeper







EMPTY PITCHFORKS

Thomas Lux

“There was poverty before money.”

There was debtors’ prison before inmates,
there was hunger prefossil,

there was pain before a nervous system
to convey it to the brain, there existed

poverty before intelligence, or accountants,
before narration; there was bankruptcy aswirl

in nowhere, it was palpable
where nothing was palpable, there was repossession

in the gasses forming so many billion ... ;
there was poverty—it had a tongue—in cooling

ash, in marl, and coming loam,
thirst in the few strands of hay slipping

between a pitchfork’s wide tines,
in the reptile and the first birds,

poverty aloof and no mystery like God
its maker; there was surely want

in one steamed and sagging onion,
there was poverty in the shard of bread

sopped in the final drop of gravy
you snatched from your brother’s mouth.

2 comments:

  1. in addition to being forced to be on the spectrum as a tech worker, no one i assist, no one i work for, no one who works for/collaborates with me, and again no office cooler, metamorphical or not, exists, in the office(s) i once dreaded, i need not go back, management realizing during the ongoing plague that, hey!, save some overhead, i do not, will not return, working from home is a quiet benefit for most of us

    ReplyDelete
  2. from Ernest Buckler's Ox Bells and Fireflies

    I see the unshed rain in the bundled clouds, thinking its troubled thoughts when I have none.

    For this is the day I have fished all afternoon in the boat with my father on the sunstruck lake that lulled the insistence out of everything. Now we are snug inside the cabin. Now the rain, loosed of its thoughts, dimples the lake with them like a million fish jumping at once. It gently clouts the the leaves of the big maple that overhangs the cabin roof.

    I stand quietly in the doorway, watching it. My father fries the trout (he never peers at my quietness), and every crude utensil in the camp glows with the comradeship of things that would be merely dingy anywhere else. I feel splashes of pure happiness as thick as raindrops.


    ReplyDelete