Article voiceover
I get stoned at lunch and listen to the lawnmowers and weed-whackers in the distance and think about the salty beads of sweat evaporating off some poor middle-aged Latino with a bad back and seven kids. I get stoned at lunch, at work, right outside, because a blind man could do my job, all you really need are two working hands, you don't even need to think, just be, like a cool-to-the-touch machine, nothing pink or blue, no gloves required. I get stoned at lunch, at work, in my car with the windows down, swatting bees and other winged bastards as they try to burrow my soul, but I never let them. I suppose that's when they know you're gone, when you stop swatting and just let them come and bite at your blood and you don't react or feel anything, or maybe you'll feel everything, all the avoidance, all the things you've burrowed from yourself.
I wrote this poem during a period of severe depression, one of thousands, when I was working at a screenprinting shop in the sad soft suburbs of Massachusetts. For $15 an hour, I’d stand at the end of a conveyor belt and fold scorching-hot shirts after they were printed and dried. One by one, second by second, sometimes only listening to the hum of machinery. It was a truly terrible time.
VILE SELF-PORTRAITS, COMING SOON.
Winged bastards and sad, soft suburbs. Funny and angry at the same time. Utterly perspicacious. Thanks.
I connected with this one. At times I've felt the same, an automaton at work that just so happens to be made of meat, thinking about the bugs that will eat me (us all) one day. Loved the sound of weed-whackers turning into an imagined life of the landscaper.