I really enjoyed this -
but on a second reading, I realised I wanted to know more about Bill, the box-biting bastard of Ballarat!
"sweating like a boy on his first promise", "more moods than a chameleon" - the similes are great!
Brian
--- On Wed, 21/4/10, andrew burke <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
From: andrew burke <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: anudder one
To: [log in to unmask]
Received: Wednesday, 21 April, 2010, 1:37 PM
At the risk of overstaying my welcome, here's a nother poem I'm dabbling
with - in a series of 'people I've worked with, jobs I've had' ; (
At the factory, we called him Bill,
The Box-biting Bastard of Ballarat.
The Dutch foreman was Andy –
he’d wave his fists and say, ‘I’m andy
with these too!’ We laughed
cause he was the foreman, but he had
more moods than a chameleon.
I escaped to the attic up a steel ladder –
cold at night, too hot to touch
in the midday sun. My role: to release
ammonia to the freezer rooms.
Down there
they wore big black ape suits
to bear the cold, while above them
I sweated like a boy
on his first promise. I’d turn
the wheel sticking up from an inlet pipe,
turn it with great difficulty as
ammonia had frozen it to the pipe.
One was a bastard, the far one of four -
it needed a metal bar wedge
in its wheel to get loose. I chanted,
*fuckin’ bastard, stupid cunt of a thing*,
trying so hard to be one of the boys.
Why wasn’t I happy to be a human being?
‘Hey, you finished up there, you useless bastard?’
--
All criticisms welcome.
Andrew
http://hispirits.blogspot.com/
'Mother Waits for Father Late' republished available at
http://www.picaropress.com/
http://frankshome.org/AndrewBurke.html
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