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In this Story, poetry saved my sanity.
Some, I suppose, might find comfort in simple, repetitive tasks. While entering the results of French fry surveys, into a database back in 1975, for instance, I may have allowed my mind to wander playfully through verdant landscapes. I may have quietly hummed show tunes or made up stories in my head about the other recent college grads who’d taken a temp job at the American Potato Company while sending out resumes in hopes of landing that first, amazing opportunity that would both utilize my talents and give me unlimited growth potential.
Instead, I did something I’d never done before or since. I wrote poetry.
Perkin’s Beef and Ale House sells french-fries
It’s not a surprise
Slingback calculators beat time on the clock
That announces our break from backspace, idle talk 3M, I be M, and she is one too?
Across the divider without city view.
Twin Peaks in the closet for buds and home fries
Umbrellas & briefcases, Xeroxed 9 to 5s.
11:17 on Tuesday. Wow, I remembered.
On day two, it occurred to me that I was not cut out for the corporate world.
Click, ditty, click
Padded footsteps unheard
While chamomile thoughts blow air conditioned smoke I astrally travel through frozen statistics Soft brown body
Owls and Monkeys
Writing genuine copy
White bathroom
Sedan
Six hours – no stab in my folders piled high Run on broadloom does not sooth my neck. High class slavery on the 46th floor.
And an hour later, this tumbled out of my IBM Selectric typewriter in Courier typeface.
Brass Rails in the market dole out quality fruit
Some frozen, prepared, dry and frenchy, to boot
The approximate price, brand, size, syle and type
Oh tell me, great secretary in the sky,
“Do you have automatic lifts on your deep-fat fryers?”
Finally…there was the poem that captured my percolating hysteria
No longer can I take it, take it, fake it, fake it, fake it
I don’t wanna peer and sneak over my carpeted divider
I am achy in the neck and back and sick of margin, tab, and back (space)
A yoga stretch, my journal calls. I’ve paced all up and down the halls.
The Girls Room sterile, scrubbed and clean, is boring just as this machine
Thank God it’s almost 4:15, but shit tomorrow’s Wednesday.
And then, as one would, I lit a cigarette and wondered what it would take to correct-type myself right out of there, onto a waterbed.