Activity

I wondered once
How many hours
Should be needed
for a
Day's Pay.
I've come to the
conclusion
that if they were
all worked
when one
felt good
We'd work until we
Died

I'm sort of glad
That there are those
that are
Bad
Then I know each day will
end and
some Part of It
will be
Fo…

Time for a smoke,
the locker nearly full:
Fourteen tons of
Swanson Chicken Dinners
for the American
officers' club in Taiwan
(breasts, thighs, drumsticks);
Six tons of wings, necks, and backs
bulk packed
bound for Sonny's Supermarket
on Pago Pago;
three tons of chicken stomachs,
a gift …

Eight or seven years ago,
before my back
began to scream at night,
we worked a rusted freighter
held together by forgotten screws.

The cargo was burlap bags of coffee
and the lingering heat of Latin suns.
Spilled beans became
ball bearings beneath our feet
as we swung the sacks
into bul…

My work is the movement of cargo, but I function as a person not a piece of machinery. I do not prostrate myself before progress or accept my work style's increasing routinization as an inevitable ago, criticized those "good." Sophocles, over two thousand years and the amassing power concerned only…

We have our own images of ourselves and our fellow workers as diverse as the characters that generate them. I am known as Big Red, and I've worked ships for fifteen years, along with Flugo, the Commander, Strong Arm Louie, the Old Ranger, Crazy Jack, Moanin' Jack, Drugstore Larry, Bicycle Larry, Sh…