FRED VOSS

Shortchanged

People are told

all their lives what is good for them who to vote for

where to go and what to do as they march

to work and up and down the streets buying things and yet

Dostoevsky

in 4 great huge novels barely scratches the surface

of what it is to be a human being.

People are told what to think

and what it all means and what

to give their lives for by politicians

and bosses and bureaucrats and experts and

teachers and traffic signals and laws

and electric shocks and 30 days in County Jail and armies

that kill millions of people and yet

Shakespeare

barely shines a few rays of light

into the mystery of the human soul.

People use up their lives

thinking they are worth nothing as they follow other people's directions

while the genius of Tennessee Williams

in dozens of plays moves our understanding

of what is really inside us

one fraction of an inch forward.

Winning

No reason

to get up each morning looking and hoping for love

that you will never find no reason

to spend your life wrenching words out of your heart

writing novel after novel after novel that will never get published,

no reason

to leave your heart wide open to a child or parent or lover

who will never love you or to

enter that race and run it over and over when

you will never win or to stare up at the stars night after night

wondering

why we are here when

you will never get an answer no reason

to keep trying to say something in a poem

or painting or song that

can never be said,

except

for that thing inside of us that must never stop trying.

Why I Will Never Stop Writing

These words I write my poems with

have picked up the broken lives of thousands of men

on concrete factory floors

and my own broken life on those concrete floors

in their hands and lifted them up to some kind of light

and transformed them.

They have given me

a way to go,

the only

way I could ever have gone and the only way

I will ever be able to go, the way

I was born for and had to bleed and vomit and weep and

moan and go crazy and want to die for because I didn't

have it,

away

that can never fail me and that is really worth so much more

than fame or money

or immortality.

Suicide

Every time

a homeless man walking a sidewalk crazy with the pain inside him is passed

by us

driving our good cars with our good jobs something dies

inside of us every time

we leave a homeless man crumpled against some wall

on asphalt where he must try to sleep in the cold and go home

to climb into our warm beds something dies

inside of us every time

on some street corner because he has failed to gather enough change

to eat again some man's

head falls as the last drop of hope drains out of him

at age 40 something dies

inside of us as

all our cold cash in those bank vaults

thrives.

Shrunken

Lives

that were once going to leap tall buildings

and save the day

and kill all the bad guys lives

that the universe once revolved around when they were 6

now

looking out of windows in lonely bare apartments

with their 13th beer of the day in their hands wondering

how they got trapped now

staring out of the high plastic windows of steel mills

after 20 years under the brutal eyes of foremen

stunned

as if they can't believe the only life they will ever live

could have ended up there,

lives

that seem to know nothing about how any of this has happened

except

that something

has gone terribly wrong.

Down But Not Out

Maybe the greatest thing about our Sunday pickup softball game

was that

no matter how lonely

or poor

or hungover or strung out or

fresh out of a mental hospital

or jail or

hated by our parents or

stuck-on-a-nowhere-job-that-was-breaking-our-spirit-and-mind

any of us were or

no matter how ugly and small and cockroach-infested of an

apartment

we lived in or

how many times we may have tried to kill ourselves,

any one of us might still

step up to the plate

and hit a home run.

Anyone

who can hit a home run

still has a chance

to turn their life around.

Mysteries

Bikers

with soft spots in their hearts

who would give the shirts off their backs to helpless bums and respectable

computer geniuses in big houses with 3 cars who

could walk by a man starving to death in an alley and feel

nothing and fragile

little ladies who have broken the spirits of their sons

for life and

a man who has never hurt anyone in his life

suddenly murdering 8 co-workers with a gun and

politicians in immaculate suits murdering thousands

and thousands with waves of their pens and

a murderous gang member

become a poet

or painter and machinists

who have always acted like they would step all over

anything throwing bread crumbs

to birds so they can take them to their chicks

born up on machine shop roofbeams people

are never as simple as you think

they are.

Broken

Laid off,

in a little trailer by a guard gate the machinists

are stripped

of tools out of their toolboxes

and photo i.d. badges

and company shirts,

stripped

of incomes,

stripped

of usefulness at 45 or 51 or 55

stripped

and sent out the gate like little boys,

little boys

with families

and mortgages

and lifetimes of pride

on the line

who must now beg

other companies for the right

to be adults.

Dealing With It

Put them away behind a wall put away

the people down on their luck the man

who begins tearing himself apart whenever he cannot get a drink the man

who murdered someone in a rage 11 years ago the men

in those alleys and out on those street corners the man

from out of state who cannot find a job the woman

whose husband beat and robbed her for 8 years

and then disappeared the teenagers

who have not found a reason for anything

but rage and violence the man

who took too much add and can't stop talking about God the woman

who lifts her dress over her head at intersection

crosswalks the man

who is willing to destroy his life for a 15-minute crack high the man

on the bicycle with no teeth who could have been a math genius the man

who steals what he thinks should have been his

to begin with put it away everything

in ourselves that we do not want to have to look at put them

away behind the wall

of a prison and pretend

that God cannot see them.

$350 A MONTH

Rooms

that hold us with nowhere to go rooms

with windows that look out on a city full of a million people

we don't know rooms

with beds that beckon us to die on them

as we sit drinking

before TVS and driving

five days a week to jobs at factories

that are not ours in lives

that are not ours rooms with walls

that are blank because we have nothing inside us to put on

them rooms

that close in on us

with low wages

and wasted years

and dead dreams rooms

that kill us

and then are rented

to someone else.

UNSIGHTLY

Shop floors

black with machine grease and pitted with potholes making forklifts

rock as they roll over them shop floors

with trails ground into them by the heels of machinists

operating the same machine for 20 years shop floors

making the toe

and knee and leg and hip bones

of workers ache with years and years on their concrete hardness shop

floors soaked with the blood of severed fingers and hands shop floors

where men have grown old

giving their best to make parts so buses

or wheelchairs could roll or planes fly or jackhammers pound shop

floors

spat on and kicked and smashed with dropped loads

and gouged with crowbars and covered with metal chips and stained

with rust and oil shop floors

never shown in a company catalogue or photo shop floors

where we spend our lives.

OUR BROTHERS

They had mothers like ours,

fathers

and dreams of being heros and saving the day and playing in the

major league and they

have shaved in mirrors and known the beauty of roses

and cried at funerals and

lifted the beating hearts of children whose lives depended on them

to their breasts and stood

up to fights and half-ton factory parts at the end of 10-ton crane

chains swinging at their heads they

have cherished the warmth of a woman who loved them against their

backs

through long nights of fear and

they have felt something like God dwell in their hearts

and tell them that they were loved,

so why

must they sit in tiny rooms downtown holding last paychecks

looking out at the hard hard asphalt of alleys

they will soon live in?

ENTERPRISE

The foreman's eyes letting a machinist know

that he will fire him whenever he feels like it all the workers

on the streets who cannot find work all

the cops ready to take them to County Jail all the machinists

racing to turn machine handles to turn out parts

faster then each other so they won't end up

out on the street all

the nightmares

and fear that never lets a man rest

or feel easy all

the stories of crazy bosses ruining lives all

the heart attacks

and fights

and murders and suicides

on machine shop floors all the lifeblood

making the engine that builds our world

race.

PEARLS

An old bent nickel with its edges curled up from being

smashed in the center so hard so many times the brimming-with-tears eyes

of a woman

staring out of a face so slack and dead

from having every dream in her heart beaten out of her

again and again the old wood sides of abandoned houses on the beach

weathered until only a few strips' of peeling paint

remain on them the deeply lined faces of old black

workers dragging themselves through another 8 hours

as their bodies scream with decades of pounding and shoving and stacking metal parts

and drinking and knowing there is no way out for them.

Maybe it's

because life has cut so deeply into them that these things

are so beautiful.

PARADISE

In the 1970s when I was young

the factories each had their flavor as I drove up to them looking for work.

There were the little tin ones

on gravel with a row of Hell's Angel-type motorcycles in front

of them

and the smell of County Jail and toxic chemicals that I drove by

slowly 2 or 3 times with a half-sick stomach trying to decide whether or not to go in even though I knew

I'd probably be hired.

There were big factories

with proud signs sporting company logos atop their roofs

on endless asphalt under blazing suns that roared

with blast furnaces and 10-ton machines that I knew

were Hells on earth

and there were the little 1-man machine shops like dental offices with the owners

that would squeeze as many keys or tubes or drill casings

or slotted steel shafts or hex nuts as possible

out of me for every penny of the low wage they paid me

and there

were all those huge aerospace companies with endless buildings on vast lots

that would swallow me up with good pay and then spit me out

in savings account-draining layoffs until I'd hung on working there long enough

that I wasn't fit to work anywhere else

and could never leave.

Never again would there be so many poisons

to pick from.

ON THE BOTTOM

It was always the big desks

that the foremen or owners of machine shops sat behind

in tiny offices as they told me they had no work available

and that there was no work available anywhere

and that they had never seen it this bad,

it was always those desks separating me from them and a job and a paycheck

that hurt, and the doors

swinging shut behind those owners and foremen as they walked

out of their offices back into their shops

full of machines and machinists cutting metal,

doors slamming shut

like 100 or 200 times before and leaving me

to walk the sidewalks that could soon

be my home.

Desks and doors more important

than my life.

BALLS

His wife just a year dead,

his torso crisscrossed

with the scars of repeated open-heart surgery,

his legs scarred

where sections of arteries had been cut out to replace

bad ones in his heart, his walk

slow as a tortoise's as he struggled for breath,

the old Lead Man always

had a cigarette

hanging out of his mouth or going

in the ashtray beside his toolbox on the workbench

where he spent 98% of his 8-hour shift sitting,

a non-filter Camel cigarette

in defiance of company rules and doctor's orders

that he made sure sent clouds of stinking smoke

into the face of every machinist

who had to come talk to him,

proud of that deadly

non-filter cigarette

like it was the last

of his manhood.

LIVING GRAVEYARD

All the crosses

on churches surrounded by vacant lots and boarded up

stores all the crosses

of black iron sticking up out of the roofs

of churches in neighborhoods where black children

who will never have jobs play all the crosses

sticking up starkly out of landscapes

of burned-out buildings and useless

rusted-out cars in yards and hopeless

beaten eyes staring out of apartment windows covered

by iron security bars all the crosses

above black asphalt streets full of drugs and cruizing

police cars and men

to whom jail is a way of life who sit

on aluminum chairs on porches or in backyards like 13-year-olds

the world will never let grow up all the crosses

on churches surrounded

by gunfire and people living 5 to a room and lost

wandering beggars screaming obscenities at the wind all the crosses

surrounded by all these people

who might as well be nailed

to them

LIFESAVERS

Just

a clickclack of a secretary's highheels

across the concrete factory floor just

a scent of her perfume in the steel dust air just

a memory of the way his mother

touched him the last time he saw her or the beautiful checkout lady

at the supermarket smiles at him just

a memory of the way his last lover held his cock

in her mouth so long ago or

a green tattoo of a naked lady dancing

on his arm as he turns a machine handle or the flesh

of that beautiful young girl in that picture on the side

of his toolbox

drawn gratefully into the embrace of the soul

of a machinist who must work

the rest of his life away inside the tin walls of shops

full of nothing but the hardness

of men,

may be enough to make the difference between life

and death.

WE'D BETTER NOT LOSE TOUCH WITH IT

All of the paintings

and the symphonies and poems expressing

what we are inside ourselves

do not seem so important next to satellite dishes

beaming around-the-world images blown up

on 5-foot-high tv screens and 100 tv channels

of endless entertainment and personalities

chattering and smiling and bombs

blowing up cars and buildings in Dolby Sensurround Stereo on 100-foot- wide

technicolor screens and the soaring arches

of bridges and freeway overpasses and huge sports arenas

full of people with scoreboards exploding in miraculous

computer-generated graphics and airplanes

zooming people around the world all of the paintings

and the symphonies and poems expressing

what we are inside ourselves

do not seem so important at all until

we remember

that what is inside ourselves

can still blow all those things up

into radioactive dust

in a few minutes time.

DISOWNED

Just because the cold asphalt of an alley has been his bed

does not mean we will let him stand on our doorstep just because

he is forced to roam the streets all day as an animal

does not mean that

we must remember when he was not one just because

he must beg on streetcorners with no one in the world who cares

does not mean that

he can come to us for help just because

he has been stripped of dignity and privacy and hope

does not mean that we must

feel sorry for him just because

he has come back to us

doesn't mean that we have to see him or talk to him

or let him in just because

he was once a part of the family of man

does not mean he is

anymore.

LOSS

The money stacks in the banks

as the hands of the homeless tremble holding the cardboard saying they

are hungry and the little change they have collected all day the money

stacks in the banks

as great unknown poets lie dying with nothing under trees

and ageing factory workers work longer and longer hours

until their bones throb with aching just to keep cheap tiny rooms and

men being evicted from apartments

scream and strike their little girls again and again and 60-year-old

men who have never been in trouble

ruin their lives

going back to companies that laid them off

with guns the money stacks in the banks as the children grow thin and pale

with nothing to eat and jobless men

who once owned houses sit in backyards

all day with bottles and eyes

like tombstones the money stacks higher and higher in the banks but it will never buy

back our souls.

SOMETIMES MAYBE THE ONLY DIFFERENCE IS LUCK

Sometimes

they are locked up and retreat into corners of padded rooms

and never talk again and sometimes

they run companies for years sometimes

they babble to themselves as they walk the streets in rags and sometimes

they drive Porsches

in $1000 suits sometimes

they cry and cringe in bed for the rest of their lives and sometimes

they take over countries and give speeches on the radio

to millions of people sometimes

they are too scared to talk or look at

another human being ever again and sometimes

they hold the lives of thousands of employees

In their hands sometimes

they draw knifeblades through the veins in their wrists and sometimes

they order thousands of people to be fired

or killed sometimes

they think they are Napoleon and sometimes

they are Napoleon.

MYTHIC

Machinists

who cover their workbenches with photos of themselves

crouched in trunks and gloves ready to go 10 rounds in their Olympic

Auditorium boxing days machinists

who cover their toolboxes with photos of the 6 or 7 vintage

1940s or 1950s automobiles

they have restored to as-new perfection and drive

to work one after the other

on various weeks

and machinists

with vans full of surfboards who every day after work drive to coves

to ride to perfection the waves rolling in under setting suns

whether showing off their cars in parking lots

or telling stories about hitting men in the old days

or leaned back on benches in the sun at lunch

describing the feel of those perfect boards on those perfect waves

these men swagger and smile

larger than life

surrounded by machinists they are glad to grace

with their stardom.

JEWELS

The old black workers

stand in towmotors or walk across the concrete floor in the paint shop

or weave between machines in the machine shop

in old overalls and there is something about their eyes

set in those heads gone gray

and faces with lines beaten into them

something about their eyes

on top of those bodies so slack and slow

like they have had every bone in them broken

3 times something like a diamond forged out of the massive pressures of their lives

something that shines with more beauty and value

than anything else in the building.

WHEN THE SUNLIGHT ON AN ARM IS LIKE GOLD

Sometimes a bum

in the thinnest cheapest clothes can shuffle

past and catch you with a look in his eye so glowing that you suddenly know he is grateful

for the sky and the worn shoes on his feet

and the light of the moon and the stars and the sinking sun,

truly grateful for the foghorns and the bellowing horns of the great ships

on the sea and the pigeons clustered on the balcony of that apartment on 1st Street

and each and every one of the tomorrows ahead of him

and how good it feels to move his arms in the air

and every drop of food that enters his mouth

and the earth under his feet

and the light in every living eye

and the smell of every green thing growing until

you feel poor

indeed.

WE DO NOT WEAR ONE CHAIN

We barely make enough money on our machines

to keep roofs over our heads

but we are not slaves.

The bosses treat us as if we have no choice

but to let them have their way with us

but we are not slaves.

We drag ourselves to work each morning exhausted

with 60 or 70-hour work weeks

to jobs that we hate

as they kill us with toil and humiliation and hopelessness

but we do not wear chains.

We are not slaves.

We have nowhere to go but to other

machine shops where they will treat us no better

and pay us no more

as we wonder each day if we might be laid off

to fatten the wallets of men who drive Cadillacs

and what will happen

if we get sick

or our wives or our children get sick

with no insurance

but no-one has a piece of paper saying that they own us.

We are not slaves.

There is nothing ahead for us

but more and more pain and fear as we grow old

and more and more cornered

and the bosses use us up

until they throw us away

but we are not slaves.

I KNOW THIS MAN

In the alley

I meet him:

a man who has had his humanity stripped from him

a man who has had his sanity stripped from him,

his wife

and his 42 years of dignity

stripped from him,

all the love and care of his mother and father

wasted,

all the child who was once 6 and had every present he could wish

for under the Christmas tree

gone.

Invisible,

he lifts lids and picks through garbage,

keeps his eyes on the ground and scurries

along walls like an animal,

and all the finest most brilliant arguments in the world

will never convince me that he deserves to be there,

for he is me

if I had not somehow stumbled across that job

on the luckiest day of my life

IT'S NOT GOING TO HAPPEN

Enduring yet another of our weekly

Self Managed Work Team meetings

we machinists all sat silent around the conference table

until Rick

the centerless grinder operator shoved his chair back

against the wall and stuck his chin out and said,

You know, if Goodstone really wants us to manage things

like this was our own machine shop, why don't they have all

those managers come to our meeting -- have them come here and

stand against the wall and we'll PICK all the ones we want

to get rid of -- we don't need all those managers, they don't

do anything to get out parts, they're not hands-on production

like us, they're just DEAD WEIGHT -- they're all just each

other's relatives or uncles or somebody's wife or friend!

They're makin' $1,000 a week and they're hiding each other,

protecting each other's asses because they know they're not

needed and they don't want to end up WORKING AT JACK IN THE

BOX FLIPPING BURGERS!

Get 'em in here and we'll let 'em know we don't need 'em!

We'll reduce costs!

WELL KICK THEIR ASSES OUT THE DOOR!"

Some machinists take the term "Self Managed" very seriously.

AS WE SPEAK OF JUSTICE AND VIRTUE

We are thieves

as the man who wanted a job starves in the alley,

we are thieves

lying on rich soft beds looking innocently up at ceilings,

we are thieves

sipping drinks on balconies looking at sunsets

depositing money from good jobs in banks

lying on sundecks on world cruizes

slipping buttery lobster onto tongues

trying on $100 earrings,

as the men who wanted a job starves in the alley

we are thieves

taking communion in churches

studying Picasso in classes

lifting beautiful children up to our hearts full of love,

in voting booths, in the finest country clubs,

with a cabinet full of civic honors,

playing a game of chess on a glass table,

we are thieves

born to the best families,

thieves

that no policeman will ever arrest,

thieves

home free

as the man who wanted a job starves in the alley.

THE PRICE IN THE EYES

As I entered the steel mill at age 23,

far more frightening

than the slam of the 2-ton drop hammer

down onto steel to make the concrete floor quake

and the heart jump

was the look in the eye of the man

who had squatted before it for 34 years,

the rage

and the humor

and the toughness to go on with his trembling jaw

and bloodshot eye.

Far more frightening

than the blast furnace with its white-hot flame

turning a ton of steel red-hot

as it roared and seared

the nostrils and lips

was the look in the eye at the man who tied tended it

for 37years,

the pain

and the strength and the brutality and the desperation

of somehow making it through

the noise and the shock waves and the stink and the heat

of the steel mill

as his hands turned into gnarled claws

and his back bent

and his fingertips shook.

Far more frightening

than all the huge machines and cut steel and flame and poundings

between tin walls

were the eyes

of these men

who had somehow made it through

like I wanted to make it through,

who knew so many terrible

gut and heart and soul-wrenching secrets

I would have to learn.

NUMBERS UNDER PLASTIC

After 10 or 20 or 30 years

of giving all the strength and life in our fingers

and backs and hearts to the machines and the parts they cut

we are employee numbers

in a seniority list under plastic

on our workbenches.

After all the years

of coming back to the same corners of this tin building

again and again until we wanted to scream

we are numbers

in a seniority list,

numbers

to be chopped off in the next layoffs

by upper managers who have never shaken our hands

or looked into our eyes

or learned one bit about us,

numbers

stacked

and ready to be chopped off

by one third or one half,

ready

to be sent out the door by security guards

to once again become people

so human

in the desperation and fear and panic

that has no number.

SOMETHING TO GET THROUGH A DAY AND A LIFE

In any machine shop a machinist may often be thinking of the sea

and of how he touches something a billion years old

when he drops a hook into it,

in any machine shop where a foreman holds the men

in the cruel deadly grip of his stare

full of the power to fire

a machinist may often be thinking

of the early morning sun

touching the jagged face of a mountain so much older

than man

or of a horse

running down a racetrack with something in the wild fury

of his legs and eyes

that Man will never capture

or of a star

so bright and sharp in the black desert sky

that he knows how small a foreman

really is,

in any machine shop

where machinists are trapped between tin walls working away their so

brief lives

a machinist may often be thinking

of any little bit of eternity

he can get his mind on.

GEARS AND BONES

There are men

on machines who run those machines all their lives,

who crouch

beside their green greasy sides under their huge barrel heads

and force

the worn teeth of their handles to turn the worn teeth of their

dial gears

by popping their elbows

and grunting

the way we have seen them do it ten thousand times,

who know

the feel of their machines' heads and tables

in their fists squeezed tight around their handles

so well

that they can nudge them to perfect thousandth of an inch settings

by the feel in their bones,

who

can make those machines do things no-one else can come close

to making them do

as their smooth effortless grace turns metal cutting

into an art form,

until

when those men finally retire

it seems like no man should ever again

run those machines,

like they should be retired

and left in the corners of tin buildings to await the grave

too.

STEEL AND SOUL

The rich people walking around the sculptures in the museum

gaze at their mammoth steel sides with eyes

full of refined good taste

but even if they went to this exhibit

1,000 times I don't believe they could begin to understand

these 20-foot tall 2-inch-thick walls of steel

twisted into elliptical teepees by Richard Serra.

All the art classes and all the art museums around the world they have the money

and leisure to go to would not allow them to really understand.

A man just let out of prison

after 3 months in solitary or a press operator who has sat on a stool in a tiny tin building

stamping out a million gaskets

would have a better chance.

A janitor

with a mop in his calloused hands

or a child of 5 or a man begging for quarters on a sidewalk

would have a better chance

would have a better chance of understanding these simple twisted rust-colored steel walls.

A man who has done nothing but wash pots and pans all his life

would have a better chance.

Maybe that is the price

the rich pay.

A KIND OF LOGIC

When the heads to our machines are breaking down

one by one causing our machines

to be idle for months and months waiting for parts some machinist

will ask

why Goodstone Aircraft Company doesn't order parts for the heads in

advance

so the heads can be fixed the same day they break down

and another machinist will look shocked and aghast and answer,

"No! No! Goodstone COULDN'T do that - THAT WOULD MAKE SENSE!"

When Goodstone Aircraft Company lays off some of our top machinists

who happen to be at the bottom of the seniority list

for a few months in the winter

to avoid paying them their 2 week Christmas-to-New Years holiday pay

and those top machinists don't come back

when Goodstone tries to recall them,

some machinist will ask,

Is it worth it, laying them off and losing all that skill and all

that good work they'd've done? WHY DOESN'T

GOODSTONE JUST PAY THEM

THE HOLIDAY PAY?!"

and another machinist will get a horrified look on his

face and answer,

Nol No way! Goodstone would NEVER do something like that - THAT WOULD

MAKE TOO MUCH SENSE! I"

Our only chance of making sense out of Goodstone Aircraft Company

is by reminding ourselves every so often that they don't

make sense.

ETHICAL GIANTS

We machinists gather in the conference room

and view the Goodstone Aircraft Company interactive video about ethics.

The video presents to us and asks us to discuss

the reasons why informing on our fellow employees is the ethical thing to do,

why

our qualms about informing are not ethical,

giving us

many phone numbers to various managers and offices and ombudsmen

so that we may inform personally or anonymously

on behavior inconsistent with company rules

and thus maintain

the company's and our ethical integrity.

Apparently Goodstone Aircraft Company

considers its filling up the office buildings with hundreds of air

conditioners

while the machine shop has none

and its consistent lying to us about our hard work preserving our jobs

and its filling of our building with toxic fumes

and its laying off of 50-year-old men

with families and mortgages

to the streets where there are no jobs

so that rich upper managers can get bonuses highly ethical.

AS THE GRAVEYARDS FILL WITH ALL OF THOSE WHO WILL NEVER MOVE AGAIN

(for Robert DeLaura)

Always the great ships full of cargo moving to port

as starving saxophone players put all their strength into the notes

that come out of their horns

and old ladies die of loneliness in spotlessly clean

apartments

and no one reads the rows of books of poetry in the public library always

the million dollar loads of goods moving toward port on great ships

on the sea a half mile out

as the pen drops out of the dead drunk hand of a Hemingway

who cannot get a word published

and no one understands

the rose

or the riffs of Charlie Parker

or the way the fog hangs around the steeple of the Villa Riviera

or the pain

in the eye of another human being always the great ships

are moving their tons of cargo to the port without stop

as the fingers of an unsung poet

ending his life at 36

stop forever

and the backs of ageing workers stiffen as they wonder

where their lives went and everywhere

people sit in rooms without one reason

to really want to be alive always

the great ships

on the sea full of millions in cargo moving toward port.

LIKE THE SUN THAT WILL RISE EACH DAY

Each day our hands throw the same machine levers

and turn the same machine wheels

the same way we have a million times before

as we swallow 6 or 7 gulps of water out of the drinking fountain

every hour or so like we have

10,000 times before and rest

our butts and hands against sheet metal workbench edges watching

our machines run for years and years and years until

those workbench edges are shiny,

wearing

paths into the concrete floors where we walk

back and forth from handle to handle hundreds of times

each day,

dreaming

the same daydreams of breasts and frosty schooners of beer and the soft bodies

of our wives next to us at night, sweeping the same oily chips across the same floors

into the same piles

with the same rocking motions of our bodies as our hands

grip the same spots on the same broom handles

and we whistle the same melodies, until

we seem as old

and unstoppable

as the tide that has inched its way up the sand

for a billion years.

AS YOUR UNEMPLOYMENT RUNS OUT

After looking out the window of a cheap room

at the alley

where you may soon

live,

raindrops

are not the same,

the faces of people begging for quarters

are not the same,

the way your Dad held your hand when you were 2

and the rose

are not the same,

the tombstones in the graveyard

and the cold eyes of the rich

and the breasts of women

and all the Indians dead of alcohol and broken promises

and the gold-plated trim

on Cadillacs

of executives who let people die in the streets

and the words on classroom chalkboards

justifying it

are not the same,

the locks

on the doors of churches

and the meaning

of sunlight on the grass

and blood spilled out of veins

and cocktails in 40th story penthouses

and all that is really important on the face of this earth,

are never quite the same

again.

SILENCE UNDER THE SUN

Out in back of the factory I lean

against a 110-year-old brick wall with a Mexican

eating lunch.

L.A.,

one man who dropped out of English Literature Ph.D. school

and another who can barely speak a word of English,

a half hour

away from the rattling pounding growling machines

and this is my graduate school:

feet and butt on asphalt learning

that no one can ever really rise higher than this moment

dropping food into a mouth and being glad

for the sun

for the shoes on our feet

for the children who need us

our ears

that can hear music and our fingers

that can feel the breasts of our wives

for raisins

and chili peppers

and a roof over our heads where we sleep at night

for Van Gogh

and the crack of a bat in Dodger Stadium

for our fathers

wrenches

and each breath we take for the clear water

and laughter

and Charlie Chaplin's cane for a chance

and the goodness

at the bottom of the heart of a man and all

we do not need one word

to share.

AN OLD WOMAN WITH NOTHING BUT HER NEXT DRAG ON A CIGARETTE

I watch the freight train slowly pull past

the old lady

smoking on the loading dock of the factory after packing

her 10,000th gasket of the day

into a cardboard box and I know

that not only has the train

passed her by

with her so tired world-weary face

but so has

3,000 years of western civilization

3,000 years

of all the decency and enlightenment and advance our noblest

minds have wrought,

as her old baggy-eyed cross-hatched-with-lines-like-knife-slashes face

sticks out

from under the rolled-up steel loading dock door

and sneaks a peak

at a distant mountain she blows a furtive puff of smoke toward

Marx

and Shakespeare and Jesus Christ and Rerrtrandt and Plato

and all the tears all the mothers have ever shed for all

their sons and daughters

and all our prayers

and Nirvanas

and churches where no human being is ever supposed to be

tossed away like trash

have passed her by

as she wonders how she will keep a roof over her heed

on $6 an hour

and no chance of a raise

or health insurance

after a lifetime of working until every bone in her body

screams.

THE GREATEST REWARD OF ALL

After 22 years of the filth of steel round and bar stock

on my hands

the flames

of furnaces leaving me seared on low wages

unemployment

in a 10 x 10-foot room In a neighborhood full of vicious

pit-bulls

I may not have one award

or trophy,

after firings

and layoffs and quitting a steel mill to keep from going over

the edge

into nervous breakdown,

after machines

heavier than locomotives slamming and hammering my

heart

until it leapt after

22 years

of getting down on my knees to scrape oil and chips off the walls

of the insides of machines or throwing machine handles cutting steel

into parts so fast all day my fingers ended up nearly paralyzed

I may

not have more than a few T-shirts

I wear to go to work to get my hands dirty

yet again,

but at least

I have never once in my life had to tell one man

what to do.

THE HEART OF THE MEN WHO CARRY THE WORLD

I have sweat too long with my arms around a bar of steel to wonder if it is real,

I have smiled from the bottom of my heart too many times

with other men

as a factory quit-work buzzer finally blared

on a Friday to care

if some men think

they have risen above us I have seen

the courage in the eyes of too many old men

over grinding wheels

to ask

if work

is noble I have

seen the look in the eyes of a man on his last unemployment check

too many times

to debate

economics I have the stink

of steel dust and burned brass too deep

in my soul to forget

that the trains

and trucks and gears of this world could not run

without us I have left

the heart of the men who carry the world

on their backs too long

in mine

to listen

to anyone who feels they are less important

than a bottom line.

TWO STRANGERS WITH EACH OTHER'S LIVES IN THEIR HANDS

So much of your life is set

in these little office rooms

where strangers interview you over plain bare desks.

So much is determined

by a few minutes slightly sweaty awkward

in chairs where you try so hard to sit like there is no doubt

in your mind

about the way you have to spend your life

on machines.

So much of your life is given away and set

by a few questions

from a stranger with stiffly crossed legs

or straight uncomfortable back

who may want to smoke

or break a pencil in two

or scream until the walls tremble,

who may wish he could go back 30 years in his life

and do it all differently,

who may not really know

what he is doing in that room anymore than you do

trying not to drum his fingers

on the desk or let one trace of weakness

show

under pictures on the walls of fueling nozzles

or submarine valves

or jackhammers

as you both stare at each other

squirming inside

knowing that you may have to look at each other for the rest of your careers

without ever getting one bit closer to really knowing why.

THE MAESTRO OF THE CONCRETE FLOOR

The janitor

of the machine shop swept his mop

back and forth across the concrete floor darkened with years and years of

machine grease,

held that rag mop rapt as he washed it out and it dripped over a concrete

sink and then

laid it down

again across the pitted cracked concrete floor massaging that floor,

loving it with muscular arms

in spotless blue denim sleeves,

stroking it

like the most inspired violin virtuoso until

he seemed to hear

a music rising up out of that chipped blackened concrete as he leaned his

head toward the

wood handle of the mop

and took his swaying

rhythmic steps,

a music

of men working their hearts out over machines so their children

might smile,

a music

of sweat and aching bones and bent screaming backs and spirit

that could never be broken,

a music

that would never be heard in the highest offices

of the richest executives,

a music

that deserved the cleanest floor

on earth.

AND WHY WOULD WE WANT TO?

We are all fools

in our suits

in our theories

in our rooms with our awards and prizes on our mantles

with our I.Q.s

and our odometers and opinions and encyclopedias we are all fools

in our judge's robes

and equations and one-tenth-of-one-thousandth micrometer

calibration marks every last

one of us without a doubt an utter

fool

to the day we die in our weighings

and our slide sections and our poet

or pope

hats

before an audience of billions

or without a friend in the world in a little lonely

cheap room over a railroad track

we all

know

that all we can ever really hope for is one moment of beauty

we do not deserve

like the rose

like the notes of Chopin

like the yellow of Van Gogh

like all

that we know we will never

understand.

TOOLS FOR OUR SONS

At the sheet metal workbench

where we machinists set parts

to check the depth of their holes

with dial indicators is an old 3-legged chair,

a chair

much older than any of us

with its gold-with-decades-of-oil-and-grime

wood

seat cracked into 5 pieces loose but still bolted into a steel frame

that looks like it could have been forged by some pre-WWI

blacksmith,

a chair

old with no purpose but to remind us

why

we keep these old wrenches

and calculators and hammers from our fathers and grandfathers

in our toolboxes,

why

we will never exchange them for any others,

why

there will always be something more important than a cut

oily drilled steel part

and that is the man

who made it.

QUALIFIED

The supervisor

could look in a machinist's eyes from 50 feet away and tell

if he was fucking off.

The supervisor paced aisles

keeping track of the size of chip piles at machinist's machines

and seeming to know

by sixth sense exactly when

they meant a machinist was running a job

at 25% instead of 100%.

He always seemed to know when a machinist appeared

to be working but was actually

half-asleep and just going through motions accomplishing

nothing, or when a machinist had snuck back 15 minutes late

from a bar on lunchbreak,

or when a machinist staring at a blueprint for an hour

was actually picturing the beautiful bodies of women in his mind.

There is no greater asset to a supervisor

than having been

the biggest fuckoff

in the shop

when he was a machinist.

A FIGHT THAT NEVER ENDS

After nine and a half hours on a concrete floor

machinists

may be swaying on their feet,

blinking their eyes and shaking their heads

trying to snap back into consciousness

before their machines

as their hands go through movements they have already made a thousand times

that day,

tired

in every bone

in their bodies,

throwing open the big steel doors in the front and back of the shop

so they can breathe

as a breeze turns the sweat on their backs

cold

and they shuffle back and forth on the concrete floor to keep from going stiff,

coming back

at their machines again and again to grab steel like boxers

in 15 rounds

of championship fights,

boxers

drawing on every ounce of nerve and strength they have left inside them

because they want to go

the distance.

THE HEARTS OF LIONS POUND IN TALL GRASS

One day

is all we are given one rising

of the sun in the morning when there is nothing

in the universe that is not part

of us one anvil

ready for the pounding of the hammer upon

red-hot metal one noon

burning on the asphalt all around us in the one life

we-have to live one train horn

through your window between dreams

at 3:00 am one love that heals

every wound

if you let it one stretching

of God's finger across the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel one

curling

of the green leaf on top of the tomato in your windowsill one evening

when you first touch the fingertip of the one you will love

for the rest of your life the hands

of all the clocks and the pages

of all the calendars are powerless

to give us more than this one day

when the hearts

of lions pound in tall grass and young girls

look into mirrors to suddenly see

beauty

and the tapping of the last steps

your father ever took toward you

never fades.

AS THE BULLS CHASE THEM DOWN THE STREETS OF PAMPLONA

In their 40s and 50s

machinists drink and eat until they have huge

beerbellies,

emptying the machine shop vending machines of their

supplies

of greasy potato and corn chips and stuffing them

into their mouths along with jelly donuts

and endless candy bars as their machines run,

wearing polka dot and rainbow suspenders

to hold their pants up around ever-swelling bellies,

raising their blood pressure until their faces are beet-red

by going into rages every time a bolt strips out,

sucking toxic fumes deep into their lungs

and laughing about how everyone's got to die someday anyway

until

they have massive heart attacks.

Then

they reappear

in 4 months or 6 months pale

as sheets and 50 Ibs. thinner with absolutely flat

bellies,

no longer drinking,

no longer smoking,

no longer stuffing jelly donuts into their mouths,

no longer going into rages over stripped bolts,

but raising

their shirts and pants legs to show

the huge scars of quadruple bypass surgeries

to younger machinists

and stick their chins out like war heros.

For each stage of life

there is a different way

to be macho.

WE HAVE NOT EVEN BEGUN

There are unknown men

living in tiny rooms with murphy beds who write incredible

poems

that turn agony

into gold unknown

men

who won battles with bottles so terrible

just rising

in the morning to shave in a mirror is a miracle

men

who climb out of guffers out of psyche wards

out of nightmares

only the greatest could climb out of

who sit unknown over chessboards in cheap rooms with

nothing but victory

more incredible than any 5-star general's men

who nearly crack

with hours

and hours of overtime on machines that become pounding

grinding stinking cut-steel hells

to give sons Christmases that will make them believe

for the rest of their lives

men

who will never see their name in a paper men

who die unknown in cities

all over this earth where Napoleons

and Caesars and Reagans and Carnegies

live forever

and we have not even begun

to learn.

WEARING MY SKIN WITH SHAME

No burn

from a blast furnace flame in my face

was ever as horrible

as seeing a Mexican machine operator jump

out of my way

like a scared dog,

no quaking

of my heart to the slamming down of a 2-ton drop hammer

as sickening

as the flinching

and hunched-over scrambling of a Mexican

out of my way when I walk down the aisle between our machines,

no severed finger

as bad as his head hung down

like he has already been whipped

when I am around, no smashed toe

or twisted back or lost eye

could ever be as painful

as knowing white skin

like mine

has been used to break the spirit

of a human being.

THE WHISTLE OF A GREAT BLACK STEAM LOCOMOTIVE

I have wanted to work until I sweat

because the sunlight was touching the rock on top of the mountain

at 6 am

and I have 2 arms and 2 hands

and there are little boys

in backyards

waiting for their fathers to give them basketballs

and beautiful waitresses smile walking the floors of diners

I have wanted to work

because no boss needs to tell me to work

as a sun

rises out of a sea

and an old man tells his grandson how it felt to pull the rope that blew the whistle

of a great black steam locomotive

as the birds sing

a shadow moves across the face of Mars

a gypsy

looks into a crystal ball while a man

drives the steel stakes that hold the circus tent

into the ground and the smell

of the sea wafts

through green curtains to the bed of an old woman on her last

day

I have wanted to work

the way the bear's muscle ripples on his back

a great marlin leaps

out of the waves a brush stroke

like none ever seen before suddenly crosses

a canvas but most of all

I have wanted to work because no one

told me to.

IT FITS THE SAME INTO ALL OUR HANDS

This

aluminum shopping cart we push

down the aisles of shiny supermarkets

to buy

$20-a-pound lobster

can be a last chance

for a man who used to own a home and have

a family it

can hold the cans tie desperately collects

for recycling center dimes to try to claw up

out of the street or

the baby

that is all a woman has left as she pushes it past the fence

of a downtown drop forge factory toward the street corner

she will beg on this same

aluminum shopping cart

we toss

ice cream and steak and mushroom sauce into

can be

the last dream

of a man or a woman who clutches it

in an alley

or beside a railroad track as the sun goes down

and they curl up on the asphalt

or gravel under it

how

can we hold it so comfortably in our hands

in these supermarkets full of so much

and not know

that we are dying

in the streets?

A WORLD IN THE MAKING

are Russians named Vladimir El Salvadorans

named Manuel ex-cons

off of boxcars from Arizona named

Clyde between

these red-brick walls we are a world

in the making on grinding

wheels welding

rods our time cards

in the rack beside the time clock we

are from East L.A.

Long Beach

Guatemala formerly communist Hungary and we

pick up hammers and

cutting tools and on this concrete floor we are elbow to

elbow

sweating the same sweat

grunting the same grunt

looking out the same window toward freedom

bleeding

the same blood aching

in the same bones for these 8 hours

our sons

have the same eyes our tongues

the same laughs and the world

is closer

together than any presidents or kings have ever brought it

as the Romanian

and the Englishman and the Japanese

who was interred as a child in a California concentration camp

during WW2 and the man

who lived in the hills in Mexico and a poet

from a middle-class suburb strain

to turn the wheels

of machines.

NIPPING ANARCHY IN THE BUD

The supervisor

has already told me emphatically

how hot the job he has given me

and how much the company president demands

that it be done NOW

and I am now working like crazy

grunting

and sweating over my machine table throwing elbows

and furiously grabbing nuts and bolts and wrenches

as fast as I can.

Still

the supervisor comes back

to tell me one more time how hot the job is

and that I'd better get it done NOW

even though I am already working as hard and fast as I

can.

A man working his ass of just because he wants to

might be dangerous.

A CHEAP MEAN DEMANDING CONTROL-FREAK ASSHOLE WHO HIDES IN HIS OFFICE

We are having a meeting

in the Screw & Foxx machine Company lunch room to evaluate

our company and ourselves because Goodstone Aircraft Company

is one of our customers

and is requiring that we have this meeting

as part of their contract with us

and Larry

the owner

has asked us machinists how we can facilitate a democratic atmosphere

between employees and management.

I think we should have a suggestion box!"

Luis shouts out

and grins

and immediately all us machinists are grinning at the thought

of having a suggestion box

we can fill with anonymous slips of paper

asking for $10-an-hour raises

and accusing the owner

of being a cheap mean demanding control-freak asshole who hides in his office

"Yeah!"

we are saying but Larry' s face has turned white

and his mouth has dropped open

as he stares at the ceiling and then shakes his head

and says,

"I'm afraid I'd be scared to read some of the things in a suggestion box."

Democratic atmosphere is one thing

Actually giving us a voice is another.

A PHILOSOPHY YOU CAN SMELL

I'm sitting in the Tooling Manager's office

listening

to all the arguments he is making so he won't have to buy

the $1.12 drill

I need to do my job when

for the first time I notice the plaque

hanging on his wall above his head:

Some days you're the Pigeon... Some days you're the Statue".

For the first time I begin to understand his unrelenting mean tight-assed cheapness:

It must be rough

to evaluate life

strictly in terms of shit.

HEADING TOWARD 105 DEGREES

Ignacio and I are standing under blue

5 ft long x 2 ft square air conditioners

hanging by chains from ceiling

of the machine shop.

They haven't been turned on in the 4 years

we have worked here

through summers so hot we staggered

and couldn't see straight.

I heard they used to run them 10 or 15 years ago,"

Ignacio says

then shakes his head as we look up at them on a morning

when it is already 90 degrees.

We make $12 an hour and neither of us has had a dime's raise in 4 years.

When we ask for a $1.00 drill

so we don't have to spend an hour trying to re-grind an old one by hand

the manager looks at us like we're trying to rob him.

All the machine shops are the same now.

Shit, if it was like it was 20 years ago

we'd be makin' $20 an hour now!

They all treat us like shit, like peons, won't give us nothin',

treat us like shit......"

he spits on the blackened concrete floor

and I nod

and we both look down at the floor for a moment

then up at the air-conditioner

then return to our machines

where we wait to change parts in their vises when they stop running

he 53 and

I 51

trying to stand

as tall as we did 25 years ago when

a machinist was treated almost like a surgeon

or an architect

trying to stand as tall as any human being when

he still has all his dignity.

THE WORLD SHINES IN MY HAND

This brass

oilfield nut in my hand shines

with the sparkle in the eye of every man who ever lifted a

load for a living

this brass 6-sided nut the size of my fist

drips with clear cutting oil and shines

like every sun that ever rose

over a skyscraper

or a lion

every shout

of a man in knee-high rubber boots striding

the length of the steel bed of a 100-foot-long machine

at 6 am

I toss it in the machine shop air and it flips and lands

in my palm and shines

with every swing of sledgehammer down from above

a man's shoulder

to drive spike into rail

each drop

of water squeezed from a sponge so it flows down the face

of a prizefighter

in the middle of a title fight each glow

in the eye of a child

seeing its first toy train

I grip in my fist the sharp edges of this brass I have cut

and it shines

the way every man has

who has ever done his best with a shovel

in a ditch or his lungs

on an opera stage

it shines

like Louis Armstrong's trumpet

holding a note that makes a woman put down the knife

over her veins and want

to live again or

the ring

a man slips onto the finger of the woman he will love

for the rest of his life.

ONE MORE BOTTLE OF SWEET WINE

On the clearest

L. A. mornings as a Santana desert breeze blows across downtown

at dawn

and clouds of smoke from the smokestack of the drop forge factory

makeshadows

floating across the windows of a flophouse hotel

I lookout

the rolled-up tin door

of this factory

and seem to see

the wrinkles

on the backs of the hands of the old man pushing a shopping

cart

full of tin cans up the bridge over the L. A. river

a mile away the pebbles

on the face of the half-moon hanging in the sky above

a bag factory

the shine

of the saxophone in the hands of a man blowing

a great Charlie Parker riff

on a fire escape

across town

as panenderias

full of sweet bread

and beauty parlours

open

and poor old ladies will be made pretty again

and teenage gangbanger Mexican boys

put their fingers around the freshest bread in town

rather than load

bullets into guns that will kill

and all the old men

finally push their carts of cans into recycling centres

for dimes

so they can have one more bottle

of sweet wine.

WHERE TV NEWS IS NEVER SEEN

For weeks in a machine shop

a man will hear nothing but the turning of arbors

gears

cutting tools as aluminum or steel is chewed

"Good mornings"

talk of aching bones

a mill man

telling how he danced with Marilyn Monroe when he was in the navy

in 1951

the ride

of a 1959 Cadillac the swing

of the bat of Willie Mays

an old man

on an engine lame asked, "How's it going?" answer

"Well, it's going... .that's what counts,"

like he was a Socrates

a Buddha

of drilled holes and ribbons of shaved steel

for weeks and maybe months

inside the blank tin walls of a machine shop a man

will hear the splashing

of coolant the laughter

of men growing old together trying to bring home the bacon to wives

and kids as rays

of sun inch east or west across a concrete floor

and the months pass

and redwood trees grow taller until

he will almost begin to believe men do nothing but work

together

Then one day a man yells out loud enough it echoes off a tin wall,

I hope we go over there and make a goddamned GREASE SPOT

out of Iraq!"

and the world crashes

back in.

GEEK MARRIES CAR CLUB QUEEN!

Frank's sister

has sent him an old picture of himself when he was in High School

and Jane

has taken an old picture of herself when she was in High School

and cut around her shape and pasted it

onto Frank's photo beside him so that

it looks like they were boyfriend and girlfriend

and framed it and set it on their bedroom dresser.

In reality

at 16 Frank was a pimply braces-on-teeth nerdy-glasses-on-nose

pterodactyl-faced pencil-necked jerk-of-the-year geek

who spent all his time reading The Encyclopedia of Philosophy

and who had never kissed a girl in his life

while Jane

at 16 was a cool gorgeous Kim Novak-like

Coachman Car Club Queen

dating the star All-California High School quarterback

but Jane

smiles and giggles as she looks at the photo and insists

that they could easily have been boyfriend and girlfriend in High School

She liked brainy

shy guys with glasses and would have aggressed Frank

and done all the talking and brought him out

and they would have gotten married and lived happily-ever-after

as he became a philosopher-machinist and she write poetry and drew cartoons

Frank

sucks down a beer as they in bed and look at the photo

and tries to forget

the machine-shop where reality is blueprint-clear

and concrete-hard

and carved out of steel and measured down to one ten-thousandth of an inch

and after his 4th beer

Frank and Jane really begin to seem to have been photographed together

in that photo and instead of having been married for 13 years

they have been married for 33

and he never wanted to die or burned up a mattress under himself

or blew up an ovenful of gas

in his face.

Who said a good marriage can't change

your life ?

DOING MY DUTY

My supervisor hiked me up the steel grid stairs

into the office

and we sat down facing each other in swivel chairs

as he invoked the name of the owner

of Screw & Foxx Machine Company

Larry wants me to talk to you.

He's upset because your efficiency rating

has dropped 40% the past week and a half."

My mouth dropped open in shock.

But there hasn't been any work out in the shop,

I mean.....

there's been half jobs,

I've only been able to keep one machine running

instead of 2 or 3.

How am 1 going to keep my efficiency percentage

when there's no work!"

My supervisor's face was set like stone

and I suddenly realized it was useless

and stopped talking

and hung my head.

If a machinist doesn't take the blame for everything

he just isn't

doing his job.