Zoned Industrial and Then Some

Poem I wrote in 1996 or so, my last days in Nausea, New Hampshire....

THAT'S HOW THEY GETCHA

and so i'm slamming away on the
assembly line packing books in
boxes---i've got it down to a system,
now--fitting in configurations of five
like clockwork--it took me a while
to get the hang of it but here i am
slogging away for the next three
hours--wiley is falling behind after
showing me a few useful tricks and
i'm impressed by my increasing
level of success--rat in the
proletarian maze of industry,
hammering away on pointless activities run
by a clock--it gets boring, naturally,
so i turn it into a private game, exceeding
wiley's progress and as i get better and
better i'm thinking, i've gotcha, wiley,
you old fart, i've really gotcha, i'm
catching up to your slow old ass--then i
realize, hell, i'm a rube of the first order--i
fell for the game, hook, line and dead
brain cells---that's how you become
a cog in their machine;
that's how they getcha.


Wrote that while I was working for this fly-by-night temp agency that would ship us out on overnight shifts to this Book Binding plant in Westford. Mass. Not long afterwards I would move to Fayetteville, Arkansas, where I spent the next 11 years working in a wheel factory. That's another story for another time.....
       In those early days in Arkansas some of my closest friends were in a band that spent a lot of time rehearsing in a storage unit. I learned a lot about noise levels and zoning laws back at that time.
That time period had a lot of influence on a short story I wrote that was recently published in THE BIRDS WE PILED LOOSELY, issue #3.....check 'em out!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!


https://birdspiledloosely.files.wordpress.com/2015/04/bpl-issue-three1.pdf