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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 with the machinations of "goods":
But rule over men, not over a dead city!
Ships are only hulls, citadels are nothing.
When no life moves in the empty passageways.
(Oedipus Rex, Prologue)
The technocrat, computer printout in hand, might evaluate the sail as an archaic, outmoded means of propulsion. But the involved vision of the artist portrays it as "Canvas wings beating down the sky."
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 bulging stacks on pallet boards.
The talk was of other lives
and private selves
with dreams of suburbs
and hard-fought football games.
An older brother heard something
in my own embroidered tale
and said, What's
a nice, educated boy like you
doing in a job like this?
I said then,
and pray it can be said at the end,
I sold my body
to save my mind.
AHHHH
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 from the White House
to the poor of Bangkok.
ahhhh
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
For Me
the capitalization is weird but i do like this.
We went to a bar. Discussed new dimensions
for the writing of words and making of books.
Shuffled thoughts like cards, and suddenly
he threw the deck out.
"We're still building pyramids for the Pharoahs."
He was getting weepy. I looked where he looked.
New buildings going up, old crumbling piers.
Men hauling lines and rigging gear on ships.
A huge crate was landed on deck.
"Still building pyramids," he flew on.
He downed another drink, popped a pill for
his stomach, and joked from the tension and
incongruities of working for a wage, working as a poet.
Sky falling into the bay.
Buildings contradicting the heavens.
He took another pill.
"Man," he said, rolling his eyes, swilling a drink,
"I must be the only hippie in the world
who has to take anti-acid pills."
McTeirnan: I'm telling you, fellas, the Nine Point Four Three clause will kill us if we don't do something about it. It's a violation of everything we fought for in the '34 strike.
Off to one side, Julie Shannon sits on a pile of coffee sacks. He's reading a book and his detachment froni the group is striking.
Carlos (heavy Mexican accent): C'mon, McTeirnan. Don't get so carried away, man. All the companies want is the right to hire a few steady guys to work the new equipment. What is the matter with you, bringing up this shit about the '34 strike? Always the goddamn '34 strike. I get tired of hearing about that shit. This is 1970 man. It's a different world.
Michael: Every oldtimer I talk to is more concerned with the Dow-Jones Average, or how much rent he's collecting on his spec property, or the price of a new camper. It's shocking as hell!
They land the load, and the forklift driver takes it away. Michael follows them back to the palletboards.
Michael: I mean ... like you're supposed to be an old militant leader. What are you doing now? Why have all you guys withdrawn? Why all the apathy?
Shannon looks amused by the tirade.
Bart: What's apathy?
Julie: That's when you get a splinter in your ass and you're too lazy to take it out. Like you.
Michael: You don't know what it's like in the hold now. The employer is fucking us over on manning, safety, all kinds of things and nobody gives a shit! All I see around me are a bunch of piecarders!
I certainly could never buy a gun in Germany, although I might have my friend professor Hans Kerlacher purchase one for me. Hans is suspicious. He has the German mind. He'd want a dossier on what I was going to use the gun for. Moreover, Hans, like most Germans, is a good psychologist. He'd see right through me. No one must suspect a thing. I must keep my secret even from Hans. When they find me, of course, not even secrets will matter then.
lmao
[...] Tomorrow I shall stand in front of the Dom, which is one of the world's tallest churches -- there's another taller in France or somewhere, I believe ... then go inside to stare up at the prodigious vaulted ceiling. What on earth did man have
in mind to construct such a building? It has no utility except an esthetic one. It is not a hotel that lodges people. Men died in its conception. That is a fact. Each workman took pride in each block of granite he set. This idea pleases me; a concept our modern day workman has quite lost. Yes, tomorrow I shall look at this church, take a train to Koblentz and ride the ferry down the Rhine past
the old castles that used to guard the river; then on to Munchen. Perhaps I shall even have a glass of wine or so, a whole bottle, get drunk and forget the entire thing; visit Hans, go to concerts, beer halls, etc [...]
[...] I took his comment to mean that those who did not belong to the Nazi Party had their strength before Hitler's advent and had maintained it. I found this quite a stimulating attitude on the part of many Germans. Of course, some had followed the party, but even in these I saw a begrudging sense of having erred. After all, it was not so long ago that Germany was officially an occupied territory. Of course, the youth had experienced none of this. They wanted new cars, television sets, sports equipment and so on, just like the Americans. They had merely supplanted one false value with another, but the second was less harmless -- or was it?