Early on I submitted a poem entitled “Work Sucks”. Old Gobbo liked it. Meanwhile it has vanished from these pages. No search turns it up.
Where did the poem go?
Maybe old Gobbo took it with him.
The poem is alive and well at PoetrySoup.com along with 96 others of mine. I just wondered if Creative Writing here has an archive or do some poems simply disappear?
I think really old posts… those from way back when, are archived, but not accessible… if I remember correctly.
I’ve searched for posts from when I first started posting here, and haven’t been able to retrieve them.
Old Gobbo taught me some important things.
Yes, he is missed. Anybody know where he went?
I’ll repost the poem for current readers.
Work Sucks
Well, I woke up this morning
For my own prime time,
Hoping swarming senses
Might light into rhyme.
With caffeine and nicotine,
My morning jump start,
I was searching for the union
Of my head and my heart;
But time won’t linger
For a groggy old muse.
I had to get ready
For my daily abuse.
Work sucks!
Work sucks!
You sell your soul
For a couple of bucks.
In the place where they call me
A human resource
I’m nothing but another
Cheap and common work horse.
So I left my apartment
With a somber sigh.
The beer gnats were kissing
All my empties goodbye.
I put on my mandatory
Worker’s disguise
And abandoned my oasis
For the florescent skies.
I greeted my boss
But what I wanted to say
Was, “Beat me with a hammer;
And we’ll call it a day!”
Work sucks!
Work sucks!
You sell your soul
For a couple of bucks.
If II didn’t have habits
Such as hunger and thirst,
I would never lift a finger
But the one by the first.
Up from rags to riches
By your own bootstrap
Only works for the folks
Who are the cream of the crap.
So you self-made believers
Of your own ballyhoo
Would you please refrain from telling me
I ought to be you.
I don’t need money
Just to prove who I am;
And the prizes you would die for–
Well, they ain’t worth a damn.
Work sucks!
Work sucks!
If my back can still hold up
While my boss gains success,
I can still be rewarded
With a heart attack from stress.
We fought a great battle,
So our fearless leaders said,
To stop fascism
Before it could spread.
We fought another battle
Over equality,
Which never quite trickles
Down to you or me.
We fought our first battle
Against royalty’s reign;
But everything we fought against
We fought to retain.
Work sucks!
Work sucks!
You sell your soul
For a couple of bucks.
Now the fascists run our businesses
For royalty’s gain;
And they call me a commie
If I dare to complain.
Now Paul, when interpreted
To sound like a jerk,
Said we shouldn’t eat
If we did not work;
But if Paul were present
In our present day,
He might change his opinion,
Seeing greed out for prey.
He might just remember
How work was a curse:
And I could finish my poem
Just ahead of the hearse.
Work sucks!
Work sucks!
You sell your soul
For a couple of bucks.
If I make it up to heaven
And find Adam up there,
I’ll hang him by his balls
And seek eternity elsewhere.
No comments on my exhumed poem?
I very much like the opening, the personal, sensory, experiential stuff, it flows great too. You lose me with the ideology. Both the soul and the flow make place for it. It always goes that way. Ive never known a poet that could include ideology and not drive out the poetry.
Im a poor guy too but I feel attacked, as I don’t look down on the rags to riches story.
Unfortunately he left after he took down the site he was doing with me, Natural World Order. He made an exceptionally good looking site, but it didn’t draw visitors. He was wondering why it was failing because, he said, “my projects don’t fail”.
He took it offline, barely gave me a chance to manually copy all the content, laughed at me for not asking him the forum file but I had no ideas of such things.
Anyway all the posts are on this thread, raw copied, that’s the last Ive heard of him.
beforethelight.forumotion.com/t … orld-ashes
Fixed Cross,
Thanks for the critique of my poem and for news of what happened to Old Gobbo. As for ideology read W. H. Auden’s poetry, especially “Sept. 1939.”
My poem was written around 1998, while I was still in the throes of “middle age crazies”. Those were days of hippie fests, beer and much creativity.
Sorry you did not like my poem.
The Horatio Alger lie has caused many to look down on the poor. Lies about fascism and royalty being sufficient reasons for war are ironically revealed in capitalistic business as usual. As for the religious references, work was considered part of the curses God placed on Adam for disobedience, but was not seen this way by Paul.
To me fascism and royalty are mere related variables for the same objective: a proto idealism in different garb.
After all who are the new aristocrats who mimic the old guard simulation?
The captains of industry heralded by the media that include the reigning stars of film and TV the media moguls who spew out misinformation etc
The game plan is unchanged only dressed up in the fascist manner of guess what’s underneath.
However, absent any other way to channel the model, can a fortituous way be to wend off ‘progress’ or climb to the top of progressive thought?
So in that sense, maybe it’s a good thing, for it has been the only one which survived the delirium of change since the 1800’s.
I speak for the poor who are constantly reminded that they don’t need a living wage while CEOs “earn” millions.
=D>
Funds could easily be spread across a society, to ensure that All lived a comfortable life, and yet they seem to enjoy the thought that most others are suffering.
It’s inconceible, but probably on point that such enjoyment is almost generic, for it’s ‘learned’ behavior to begin to class differentiate from the ground up
It is a systemic way to separate those who are worth to be noticed from those unnoticeable.
This enjoyment is tortuously a primer for those who want to belong
To belong… to whom, to what, to where?
I complimented you on its initial style.
All poets have gone this way; start out in inspiration, end up in the intellect.
Start out with the sublime, end up in the ego.
Start out naked, end up in armor.
Thanks. Sorry I misunderstood you. Poets strive to turn the particular into the universal or to see the particular in the universal. The “I” who speaks a poem is not the ego involved in materialistic pursuits. It is a point of reference to the particular. All poems involve intellect gone interior, bathed in inspiration.
My guess is you did not like the anti-capitalist sentiment. I could be wrong.
The poem was a product of “blood, sweat and tears”. It was sorrow transformed to humor. It is was compassion in disguise.
It was written in 1998, thirty years after the hippie happenings; so it is also a bit of nostalgia. The social criticisms of that time are, in my opinion, valid about today’s capitalistic society.
The narrative describing the poem stands on it’s own. I have mixed feelings about whethe I could have built a transcendentally objective view of the 60’s in the imminent state of mind that presented a block at that time.
I think it appeared as if those times were not transcendent, that nothing could break the enthusiasm, even if the new left’ was beginning to crack.
Oh sorry for the affrontery of displacing your objective of in the verse, if at all.
Take this as a kind of belated apology of sorts.