Panthera Tigris

Let's talk about your tiger.
The one that started following you around,
years ago now,
until you wonder how in the hell you used to slog through the days without one.

The tiger rides in your car with you,
fucking with the automatic windows.
She winds her way through the aisles at Target,
close by your side.
Make way, shoppers!
She leaps into the basket, taking the whole thing up.

Two biddies are scowling at you.
"Isn't it against the rules???"
"That tiger should be in the rain forest.
Or wherever tigers live.
Where is the manager????"

Tiger could care less.
She has fangs and claws that would make anybody crap their pants.
And who knows?
Maybe she has raised little tigers til there were enough baby tigers.
Maybe she has plucked monkeys right out of trees.
Maybe whole villages have had to stay in at night, on her account.

Your tiger wanders the 'burb at 3 a.m.
"Poor stewardship," says your next door neighbor, in a written note.
"Selfish, keeping a wild animal like that," says the busybody across the street.
But maybe the tiger was sick of the mangroves.
Maybe it was lonely there.
Maybe she felt lacking, like a museum tiger, until she found you,
but waking upon receiving your smokin' hot kiss,
she made up her mind then and there.

She stays because she wants to.
She's a tiger.
Who's gonna tell her no,
when she's such a big pretty kitty, and loves you so?
________

for Artistic Impressions at Real Toads

Annie, unfinished

a fragment, or rather a beginning, of a poem for Real Toads Out Of Standard. 

Annie Oakley joins a pack of peaceniks
living off the land
and off the grid.

Blonde-haired Jennie Frizz, who stopped using product in order to protest artificial standards of beauty,
picks up Annie's rifle as if it might bite,
and carries it out to the goat pen where she uses it to replace a broken fence post.
Annie Oakley's true soul sits silently inside the chamber like a lonely Golden Bullet.

Why does Annie allow this? 
Because Bill thinks it's a good idea,
and she loves Bill
wonderful Bill
wontcha marry me Bill?

Meanwhile, out in the goat pen....
______

So now what? You tell me, in the comments! 

Book Review: "Nickel And Dimed"

Nickel and Dimed On (Not) Getting By in America by Barbara Ehrenreich

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Get a job, you bum. That's exactly what Barbara Ehrenreich did, but in her case it was get a job you incognito PhD.

It's stylish these days, in certain circles, to rail about handouts and entitlements. It's s.o.p. to advocate tearing down the safety net for those in poverty. But what is it really like in America for millions of working poor?

In this book, Ehrenreich works as a waitress in Key West, a Merry Maid in Maine, and a Wal-Mart "associate" in Minneapolis, complete with having to find low cost housing and make ends meet. She did allow herself a car, and a small stake to get her started, which is certainly more than a great many people start out with, but she freely concedes that what was a series of three month-long immersions in the world of the working poor for her, is unending for many many people.

What she found was eye opening indeed. First, there was the dispiriting process of job hunting, which usually included drug tests and "personality testing" with a strange focus on marijuana use. Right from the get-go, an applicant has to prove that she is not a drug addict, a thief, or capable of independent thought, before she can even be considered for employment. The level of intrusion just to apply is humiliating.

Then, two of the three jobs she got leaped straight from application to orientation, conveniently skipping the moment of actually offering a job, describing wages and benefits, and giving the applicant the chance to accept, refuse, or counter. It's pulling a fast one.

Then there were the jobs themselves. Waitressing in Key West for about half of minimum wage plus tips (shared with hostess and busboys), she discovered that, along with drunken frat boys, the worst tippers were Obvious Christians aglow with light after church functions, leaving a dollar tip on a nearly three figure tab. Just to get started, she had to buy the the right color pants, and some kind of serviceable shoes, putting her behind right from the start. She soon discovers that her friend, who trains her when she starts, is living in her car. Other co-workers are crammed in to small living arrangements with relatives or roommates.

In Maine, she catches on with Merry Maids. After watching several how-to videos, she goes to work, traveling to clients' homes as part of a team of four women. The homes are generally big, the owners absent or hawk-eyed, and the procedure aimed more at making the home *appear* clean, than actually *being* clean. Only a small amount of water is allowed. Nothing to eat or drink in clients' homes, even though the work leaves her sweaty and exhausted. One of her fellow maids seems to live off of corn chips, and only one of them has a house of her own (because her husband has a steady job). Discovering that she can't make ends meet from just the maid job, she gets a weekend gig at a nursing home as a dietary tech, seeing to it that the residents of the locked Alzheimer's ward get fed. Still, even working seven days a week at difficult physical work, the numbers only barely add up. One reason is the seemingly customary practice of holding back an employee's first check until they leave or quit. The maid service and Wal-Mart both did that. What the hell IS that? It's just one of a million examples of things that are done to the working poor just because it benefits the employers and the employees have no power.

Wal-Mart may be the strangest job she got, working there in Minneapolis. It's the cult of Sam (Walton). Again with the drug test, personality test and fast shuffle into "orientation". And again with the minimum wage and withheld first check. Ehrenreich finds herself working in ladies', endlessly pushing carts full of discarded items from the fitting rooms or the displays out into the store to be put back where they belong. It isn't as physically hard as the waitress or maid jobs, but it is mind-numbingly routine. Ehrenreich's writing skills and sharp irreverent humor save this section, and I laughed in spite of myself at passages like this one: "I feel oppressed, too, by the mandatory gentility of Wal-Mart culture. This is ladies' and we are all "ladies" here, and we are all forbidden, by storewide rule, to raise our voices or curse. Give me a few weeks of this and I'll femme out entirely, my stride will be reduced to a mince, I'll start tucking my head down to one side." This last adventure turns out to be the worst one, not because of the job, though it is dispiriting enough, but because she cannot find affordable housing, though goodness knows she tries. She stays for a while in a horrid residential motel, then moves to a Comfort Inn (many of the working poor have to live in residential motels because they cannot come up with first and last month's rent for a regular apartment.) her money runs out after three weeks and she returns to her real life. Someone scrambling under these circumstances because it is their life and not just book research, would have been on the streets, or living in her car.

Ehrenreich blows up the myth that a job, by itself, is the ticket out of poverty. Repeatedly, she found that one minimum wage job was never enough to even survive on, and even with two jobs, there was nothing left over for anything unexpected, or for anything beyond the most rudimentary medical care (lots of Advil). Housing ate up huge portions of hers and her co-workers' pay, IF they could find any at all, and this book was published in 2001, boom times by comparison to now. She says that the jobs she found easily when she wrote this book aren't readily available today.

She also brings home the invisibility of the poor, at least to those above them on the socio-economic ladder. It's a brutal, demeaning, exhausting way for anyone to have to live, and offers very few roads out. At the very least, if you read this book, you will never see a waitress, or a maid, or a Wal-Mart "associate" the same way again. Highly recommended.





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You

I was thinking about you,
as the fan hummed in the window--
as the stars spun slowly above my little street--

I couldn't help myself from thinking about you,
as five white birds skimmed over the near rise--
while their mirror sisters gathered--
first one,
then two,
into their warm nest--
the other three fluttering near.

I was thinking about you, Sweetheart.
Did birds fly across the stars outside your window?
Did you know?
 

Quiet On Set

A career in opera doesn't always work out for a girl,
and so then she has to fall back on Plan B.

The land around here looks like it's been through God's own laundry press,
and it only rains every Fourth of July,
leaving the year-rounders feeling itchy and bad-tempered.

This is no place for Bo Peep, with a pink bow in her hair.
Nobody wants to hear Puccini,
but there's a snake handler under every tent.

Into this maelstrom of dust and cowshit comes Our Heroine,
by means of Plymouth automobile,
ready for a different kind of star turn.

Sick of marrying the same guy over and over,
she sets her happy ass down in front of the big yellow ball of the setting sun,
and memorizes her lines,
which are, basically,
the sort of stuff some screenwriter in L.A. thinks a girl like her might say.

Well, who cares?
Her leading man is gay anyway,
and she's doing the job for a flat fee, 
so she doesn't give a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut whether it tanks or is a smash.

Tomorrow she'll rope the young actor from Indiana,
and by the time the stars come out,
he'll be rattling off nonsense about the future, and men on the moon.
She'll have shown him,
first hand and--though softly--right in his ear
how well she can yodel,
among other wondrous things.
_______

Mixing fact with bullshit for Magpie #231.

 

Coleus and Oleander

coleus

I found a girl in my garden
between the coleus and oleander,

who, by mushroom and moonlight,
became a feather-armed woman,
a secretary bird.

Serpents had troubled me,
on my floors,
and in my hair.

Deliverer,
white as a bride,
bringer of blood and nightheat,

whisper me coleus and oleander,
my hair--my vanity--unbound.
________

for Flash 55 at Real Toads.

Dainty Maid

I'm a delightful, dainty maid
with a girlish giggle and a live grenade--

I felt silly,
so I blew up Billy.
An evil devil murderess,
that's what the judge says.

But let me run and gain plurality,
then my prank is simply policy.

What a dainty little duality.
Would you like to play with me?
_________

for Marian's music prompt at Real Toads