Volunteer
September 20, 2011
You balk
when someone
tells you what to do.
It’s not that you’re
incompetent, you’re
not, but nine times
out of ten you screw
things up. You take
an order then you just forget
it when you’re halfway
to the place where you’re to
do the work. And then ashamed to be
yourself you turn around and slink
back to the man in
charge to ask just what
the order was he rolls
his eyes like huh just like a
girl huh can’t keep a simple order
in her head. You chuckle like,
You’re right so get a guy I quit! He
spits and so you go to
start the work, repeating
in your head the order so that
this time you’ll remember it. That
does the trick sometimes but other
times it doesn’t work and you go blank
and lose your sense of
time and place. Where are you?
Did you volunteer? Who signed you up?
Or are you dreaming, damn that’s hot,
the ingot, or the pizza slice, or some component
part you wrap it, set it in the box, and now
it has your fingerprints. Your hands
are shaking and your breath
is coming fast and short.
When can you take a break,
you need to pee from
all the beer you drank, and
meanwhile all the others working, working,
whistling while they work, while you’re
at sea, adrift, about to weep. The feeling now
arrives, on cue, you try to stop it but
you can’t. The more you try
the worse, the worse, it gets.
The weird thing is that while
it’s getting worse you’re feeling
like a million bucks, now figure
that one out.
You’d love this feeling any other time,
you’d wallow in it, you’d luxuriate but
now is not the time for that
to say the least. Your heart
is crashing through your chest,
your eyes are hot with blood, your skin is
sizzling now your gums begin to hurt
because your teeth are clenched so tight. You start
to howl, not with your voice,
just in your head, a wolf,
the woods all black, the moon
above which when you were
a kid you thought was a projector
lamp, the film had stuck, the frame that was
a girl in bed had melted into brickle
shapes and then the screen went bleaching,
blinding white. The film was you,
asleep, or so he thinks,
his hands inside asbetos
gloves, his bellows blowing coals
red hot, his hammer clanging, steel
like taffy, dunk it in the water poof
it’s cool, the Golden Spike, it hurts
to death, the Wedding of the Rails.
Oh, God, please stop, you shout. You’ve
made your point! Too
late, the whistle now it’s
time to quit, the stars come out,
the ring around the moon,
beneath your back the lake with ice
so thick it holds a horse but not a cart,
the crack is like a shot, the cart falls
through and sinks, you fall
asleep headfirst the bubbles intermixed
with silt rise up, you wake, the blacksmith doesn’t
find you, wouldn’t find you
if he looked.
Copyright © Peter Maeck 2009