VOSS, Fred
A country in our Hearts
On machine #5 Juan
forgets
and says, “Thank you, my friend!”
with genuine unashamed child-like joy
when I come over unasked to grab one end of the heavy vise and help him
lift it
onto his machine table.
Then he remembers
and looks around himself to see if any of the other machinists have seen
or heard him
and puts the same mask of callous indifference they all wear
back on his face.
It has been only 5 years since he left El Salvador to set foot
in America
and sometimes it is hard to keep the mask
on his face.
“Fleetwood Mac!”
he calls me
because I have long hair and a beard but no hair
on top of my head like that guy in the rock band Fleetwood Mac
and smiles
and tells me
how he likes to sit in a soft easy chair each evening after work and listen
to rock music
that knows no borders
and with our hands on wrenches
I look
over from machine #2 at him and break out
in a big beaming smile
just to show him
that when it comes to wrenches
and vises and machine tables
and the joy
still shining inside a human heart
there will never be
any borders.
Suicide
Every time
a homeless man walking a sidewalk crazy with the pain inside him is passed
by us
driving our good cars with our good jobs something dies
inside of us every time
we leave a homeless man crumpled against some wall
on asphalt where he must try to sleep in the cold and go home
to climb into our warm beds something dies
inside of us every time
on some street corner because he has failed to gather enough change
to eat again some man's
head falls as the last drop of hope drains out of him
at age 40 something dies
inside of us as
all our cold cash in those bank vaults
thrives.
Winning
No reason
to get up each morning looking and hoping for love
that you will never find no reason
to spend your life wrenching words out of your heart
writing novel after novel after novel that will never get published,
no reason
to leave your heart wide open to a child or parent or lover
who will never love you or to
enter that race and run it over and over when
you will never win or to stare up at the stars night after night
wondering
why we are here when
you will never get an answer no reason
to keep trying to say something in a poem
or painting or song that
can never be said,
except
for that thing inside of us that must never stop trying.
Sometimes maybe the only difference is
Sometimes
they are locked up and retreat into corners of padded rooms
and never talk again and sometimes
they run companies for years sometimes
they babble to themselves as they walk the streets in rags and sometimes
they drive Porsches
in $1000 suits sometimes
they cry and cringe in bed for the rest of their lives and sometimes
they take over countries and give speeches on the radio
to millions of people sometimes
they are too scared to talk or look at
another human being ever again and sometimes
they hold the lives of thousands of employees
In their hands sometimes
they draw knifeblades through the veins in their wrists and sometimes
they order thousands of people to be fired
or killed sometimes
they think they are Napoleon and sometimes
they are Napoleon.
Broken
Laid off,
in a little trailer by a guard gate the machinists
are stripped
of tools out of their toolboxes
and photo i.d. badges
and company shirts,
stripped
of incomes,
stripped
of usefulness at 45 or 51 or 55
stripped
and sent out the gate like little boys,
little boys
with families
and mortgages
and lifetimes of pride
on the line
who must now beg
other companies for the right
to be adults.
On the Bottom
It was always the big desks
that the foremen or owners of machine shops sat behind
in tiny offices as they told me they had no work available
and that there was no work available anywhere
and that they had never seen it this bad,
it was always those desks separating me from them and a job and a paycheck
that hurt, and the doors
swinging shut behind those owners and foremen as they walked
out of their offices back into their shops
full of machines and machinists cutting metal,
doors slamming shut
like 100 or 200 times before and leaving me
to walk the sidewalks that could soon
be my home.
Desks and doors more important
than my life.