TUESDAY: How It All Began

BY JOHN GREY

Copyright is held by the author.

Working third shift
in a bank operations centre,
on minimum wage,
tearing printer-loads of paper apart,
and dumping them onto
the top of stacks
or slipping them into mail boxes —
nobody was born to do this.

But the landlord
is only ten footsteps away
and the finance company
trails me like a plain-clothes flatfoot.
So I’m stuck in this warehouse wannabe,
doing mindless work
to the relentless rhythm
of the same songs
blasting over and over on a radio,

Some guys I’ve known were in Vietnam,
still shudder at the sound
of a helicopter overhead.
My chopper is anything
by KC and the Sunshine Band.
They reach for an imaginary Ak47.
I grab at an invisible box-cutter.

But this is the immigrant life.
You take jobs that no one else wants.
You live some place that comes so cheap,
you still can barely afford it.

I’m not brown. I’m not Asian.
I don’t look like I’m from someplace else.
But I have no family here.
I speak a different language.
And my country’s in a letter
in my back pocket.

Yeah, sure I’m legal.
But my apartment’s not airconditioned.
The summer sun’s no place
for daytime sleeping.
I’m still a dreamer.
But one who doesn’t dream so well.

***

John Grey is an Australian poet, U.S. resident, recently published in New World Writing, California Quarterly and Lost Pilots. Latest books, Between Two Fires, Covert and Memory Outside The Head are available through Amazon. Work upcoming in Isotrope Literary Journal, Seventh Quarry, La Presa and Doubly Mad.