Temp

Temp

I skip food
all day.
“Feel free…”
says the boss lady
“…to anything unclaimed
in the frig
in the break room.”
except everything’s marked.

“and May will give you
her leftovers…”
May sports a grease dabbed lab coat
with spindly gloved fingers growing
out the ends.
She jabs hot pockets
with thermometers
testing the evenness of
heat
only no one tests the
evenness of the microwave.

and all day damn long
she is doing this

and I am hungry

only they smell good
at first
then the puss of grease
sweats heavy
like
20 grams of saturated american

I am hungry and
nauseated at once

hungry and nauseated like
morning sickness

galvanized tin wraps
everything that isn’t
wrapped in
pastel
frosted pressed glass on sliding doors, open pristine ceilings and spotless guts for vent pipes, hanging paper light fixtures coughing up warm sensuous phlegmatic yellows, cubicle after meshwork cubicle, flatiron grills on the sunnyside portico with withdrawn umbrellas on unashamed lawn ware---everything was so perfect as to wax postmod and crisp and boring as masturbation with your happy hand

as boring as this poem

as sashaying into the
men’s room
and hammering out
a sneak session of my own

on lunch of course

squandering precious goods
I’d otherwise absorb

to kill the stress of hangnails
and swollen fingers arrived at
by hours of labeling
boxing

and to stave off hungry

and that’s sad,
sad sniffing boredom’s ass
like a six headed hell hound

give me your 9 to 5 workaday stiff
never late on bills or the mortgage
or late to work
and one day mingles into another like bar stall piss oder
A homeless man, a desolate man, on the edge of life---
he has a story to tell

Me, today I almost slipped
on wax paper

The guy next over, the guy working so fast
we don’t have to come back tomorrow,
beat me out of next week’s supper

He says: “If I had to do this every day I’d have to slow down, and fortunate for me I got temp work pulling 30 an hour before my real lab job begins.”
I ask him what he
reads, he doesn’t read
I tell him about my home experiments,
he doesn’t care

He complains about the job
and
for Christmas I give the wife my share of food