Going Back to Work Again

In 1970 I was living in East Lansing, Michigan where some friends were attending MSU. I started to read my poetry at the Aardvark Coffee House. Even in the beginning I was more of a performer than a reader. I’d film the audience with a video camera that was hooked up to a television so the audience could watch itself watching me. I’d set poems on fire. I’d make up poems on the spot and ask the audience for help. I wanted the audience to unite, join in, be one, make revolution, end war, and topple governments.

Well, none of that happened and I returned to Philly in the fall of 71, living off friends, without any training for any sort of job getting one finally at the Taylor Lock and Key Factory way out on Erie Avenue in North Philly. I had flunked out of college but still had school debts. The Sixties were over; Nixon was still dropping bombs on North Vietnam and my friends were getting their degrees groomed with haircuts for jobs I thought were compromising. I felt betrayed. Betrayers! I let my hair grow longer and lived without a phone in Powelton Village. Eventually to save money for a trip to South America I got a second job working nights in a garage in West Philly vacuuming and watching over a fleet of tour buses.

Soon boys who were members of the neighborhood street gang began to hang around. Here I was, white, in the middle of their ghetto in the middle of the night. They’d come and talk and even helped me work. Things I would do and say would make them laugh, but I didn’t mind that; I was something new to look at and something new always makes the curious laugh because they’re glad. They could be bad. Once they started a bus and ran it into another one; sometimes they’d sneak around, see what there was to take; sometimes they’d stay till dawn. They never went to school. Why go to school where a rival gang might kill you? Where you were put in a classroom with so many kids no teacher could control it much less teach you. Why go somewhere that makes you feel stupid? I wondered why they’d wander the streets to do battle with other gangs of kids. I knew they didn’t want to. One boy told me how he ran home and prayed all night after he’d stabbed another; they knew that they might die, that the idea that they were defending their turf was ridiculous, but this idea of manhood was too much for them. Before a fight they’d sing how they were going to kill their rival, get his girl, get his gun, get his drugs, and it seemed I was in old Africa witnessing the rites of manhood as they danced back and forth singing before going forth to kill the lion.

My next job, after the locks and keys, a few years later, would be as a cook where I started at the bottom cleaning lettuce and worked my way to the top making the sauce. Being a cook was creative, full of improvisation, adventure, coordination and timing. It was fun. The factory was tedious as hell where nothing new ever happened. I worked with two paint sprayers who sprayed the locks, some with black, some with silver and some with gold. I set the locks up for them on flat long thin metal trays that I piled kind of high like a house of cards I brought to them on wheeled tables rumbling over the bumpy floors. The two guys were near retiring. One was tall and pretty muddle headed, tottering kind of like the locks I’d piled up for him, and he always walked tottering straight ahead forward like a horse keeping that direction against all else; the other was short and thin chain smoking unfiltered Camels in all the fumes, and I mean fumes, we worked in a room full of fumes shifting like clouds. When I stacked enough up, I’d hide behind the boxes of locks I’d arranged in tall rows away from any boss. There I read Gide’s Lacadio’s Adventures and The Counterfeiters, the Bhagavad Gita and Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, a book I devoured as it devoured me, changing me, digested knowing I could write about everything and write about it differently over and over again; soon Whitman would be showing me how to be a poet, which is of course to be yourself because it is out of you, the truth, the poetry will come. And it did come. Oh Walt and I made love. But that would be later on. If I wasn’t reading, I’d sit on an overturned empty box with my back resting on a column of boxes I’d piled up writing notebooks full of novels and short stories half done, frustrated because I knew what I wanted to do, but I didn’t know how to do it, doing everything I didn’t want to do and doing nothing that I wanted.

Going Back to Work Again

Black morning coffee yes I’m walking
Subway sleeping, no one talking
Every day and every day, it never ends
I spend my time with locks and keys
In a ghetto factory
And every morning it’s back to work again.

At lunchtime the ladies say, “The war was over yesterday,”
But I say no, “We’ll shake and shake till the bitter end.
Dropping bombs, chopping hands
Never changed the heart of man
No, tomorrow morning it’s back to work again.”

Going back, I’m going back
Lord, Lord, I’m going back
Going back going back going back to work again
Old Sisyphus did fine pushing one rock all the time
And I’m going back, going back to work again.

On the A train riding home I saw Jesus casting stones
I cried, “Lord, you said that was a sin!”
He said, “Son, I guess that’s so, but I never said I couldn’t throw.
Now you get on back, get on back to work again.”

Cool dark well I thought I found
Deep and wide, I could not drown
Quenched all my sorrows at my rainbow’s end
Hold me honey, squeeze me tight
See if we can’t make it last all night.
Tomorrow morning it’s back to work again.

Going back, I’m going back
Lord, Lord, I’m going back
Going back going back going back to work again
Old Sisyphus did fine pushing one rock all the time
And I’m going back, going back to work again.


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