Time Clock

1.
When I came out the overhead door, I thought I’d
never come back in. No more upstanding American
taxpayer. No more responsibilities to keep my hands

curled hour after hour. I have no fascination in premature arthritis,
early balding, squeezing stress balls. I don’t want
to fill out another fucking W-2 or hang out in the break room for
a half-hour.

No, I don’t want my own locker or office to keep my meaningless tools of
confinement locked up in. That’s where I should sleep, upright,
for the rest of the day.
I’m moving to lands of mandatory siestas, lax bosses with
no corporate mustaches.

Fuck ties, wrinkle-free shirts, pressed slacks!

2.
I dredge up the time when I was employed as a telemarketer, calling other pathetic
American dreamers at dinnertime. I phoned a woman in Arizona to offer her some
mind-boggling deal on an auto club membership through her credit card.
She screamed at me to get a real job. She informed me that I was
interrupting Wheel of Fortune and her tapioca pudding session.
That the likes of me were the leeches of the workforce.

I attempted to read my automatic response screen, but stopped short of politeness.
I’d had it.
I let her know that I would be sending her information about
accidental death and dismemberment plans, then hung up.
I put her down for a five year plan in the auto club.

I want to be an unemployed scavenger of thoughts, imaginings.
I’m going to paint time clocks fetus pink, cover the secretary’s office in
poison sumac, arrange all the files the wrong way.

3.
I haven’t ended up in the land of forty winks yet, but
I do have a job in a book warehouse.
Nightshifts in the summer allow me
listen to Chicago Cubs baseball games on the radio,
drink beer.
I also help out the homeless wanders by
pitching out my aluminum cans. I think they get around
seventy cents a pound these days.

After a few nights of me drinking,
they can collect their goods and

punch their own kind of time clock.