Work Anxiety In the Lake District
First orders come from
above through murder holes
drilled into the floor where
the main bar sinks overflow
and the slop sinks leak.
The waitress is sleeping,
head down on the invisible
cellar bar while a rush of
patrons arrive, walking single
file down misaligned stairs,
chanting verses from a Pink Floyd
song, shouting out orders as they
pass into the well-lighted, unfinished
basement lounge. Second orders
come over the bar from everywhere
at once but all the bottle are
somewhere else, up flights of stairs
others are using, all the taps open
and free flowing but the glassware
is inaccessible in too tall, overhead
racks, in too low cabinets you have to
lie down next to in order to retrieve
what lies within, reaching hands
scraped and bleeding on rough hewn
wooden shelves, on the chipped and
broken glass, still more orders come
and there is no room to move,
the basement ceiling pressing down,
more murder holes being drilled,
delivering last orders from above.
Bleeding: a work anxiety dream
Finally dozing after being unable
to sleep. Anxiety dreams, immediate and intense.
No longer do they focus on undergrad
academic failure, flunking out, the unknowable end.
The end in those college days meant
a place like Vietnam. Oddly, no anxiety
dreams of grad school, though the workload
was twice as bad, no sleep then, between
classes, assignments, working a late night
job. No sleep, then, for years; living on
beer, empty gas tank fumes and beer.
The anxious dream centers on the work-
place, introduces a wound, a glass cut
to the bone, blood in the ice. No one
cares. It’s all about the bleeding self
carrying on, working, tending bar
one handed for ten hours without a break.
Everyone who sees the wound says
it needs stitches. Lots of stitches.
The bleeding wouldn’t stop, the stained bar rag
slipping, hanging loose around the wrist.
But there I am, building cocktails with my right hand,
deliberate, but carrying on, all fluidity lost
for the duration. No one cares how I feel,
if the wound is dealt with or not.
No one cares how I am unless the drinks
are tainted.
Abu Ghraib: a work anxiety dream
That one where you are
transported to one of those
torture chamber prisons in Iraq
where they apply hoods with
no eye slits and strap you into
stress positions and play
repetitive bass line music/ noise
punctuated by a kind of bell so that
you feel as if you are only half-
conscious/passing out and a voice
accompanies the noise chanting
in a foreign language you think of
as Urban, not one recognizable as
an actual tongue but something
like one, endlessly repeating spat out
hate infused syllables so you plead,
“I’ll talk. I’ll tell you anything.”
But they don’t want you to talk.
They want you to suffer.
Sleeper Awake: a work anxiety dream
I wake up in my dream though
I know I am still asleep.
I’m late for work even though
this isn’t time for my shift.
They must have called me in to open
the day after a night I closed.
This used to happen quite often
at The Rib when Linda was working
as she didn’t know where the bottles
went. So I’m getting dressed and
it begins to feel like the Dali dream
sequence in “Spellbound” inside
the bar I have been transported to.
And then it is raining while I’m rushing
to the bus stop and my umbrella is
full of holes but I’m moving backward
instead of forward and I’m going to be
really late and wet which also used
to happen all the time at The Rib
as traffic was so bad I could never
cross Route 5 . But I’m not working
at The Rib anymore, even in the dream,
it’s The Tavern and one of the college
kids is already setting the place up,
so what did they need me for?
And he’s taking rolls of quarters,
like a hundred of them from some guy
off the street and giving him all
our big bills and the owner’s daughter
is cashing checks, so there is no cash
money at all in the drawer, just change,
more change than you could use in
a month but break a twenty? Forget it.
And the college guy is looking at me
like it’s all my fault and like, what good
was I anyway? I’m like way too old to be
working in a bar. So I perform a couple
of drink making, sleight-of-hand tricks
and he’s like Spellbound and I’m back
in that dream again, though it seems more
and more like that black and white flick,
“Kafka” and then the Welles noir, “The Trial,”
and I finally realize the only reason that I’m
there at all is someone has to get shot in the end.
Half-Tone Beckett in Bar Light:
A Work Anxiety Poem
They went down to the cellar
with flashlights and returned,
filthy, bedraggled as hounds
left in the rain to wallow in
offal and mud.
They decamped, mid-bar on stools,
that scraped the foot scuffed floors
amid the remains of a night of
serious drinking.
Seen from afar, well above the bar,
light is refracted through green
bar bottle glass like shards of
misspent lives, dissembled as
hobo Hoover towns like hoarse
voiced village criers delivering
messages no one wants to hear
around camp fires in 50 gallon
drums.
All the garbage of their lives
amount to nothing more than
left-behind stogie stumps and
cigarette end prophecies that mean
nothing in harsh pre-dawn haze
waiting for what the new day brings.
Work Anxiety Dream: Stalker
After hours, lights down in the bar,
chair legs facing up on the tables,
only the EXIT lights glowing,
the click of the sound turned down jukebox
playing songs, no one can hear,
random compressors kicking on,
shutting off, the ice machine dumping
a new load of cubes on the mounds
in the deep freeze…
Down the worn thin, unevenly spaced
stairs, into the low ceiling cellar where
the walk-in coolers full of beer are,
the leaking pipes, frayed electrical
wires, the single too-low wattage bulbs
on pull chains are and the wooden, sagging
shelves packed with bar supplies,
used guest checks, register tapes and
the overwhelming smell of sewage,
the creeping damp from the cobblestone
floor, the standing water the sump pumps
can’t contain, where the footsteps not
your own follow yours in a hard-to-focus
gloom, each deep breath feeling like
the next to last one, as we move from one
shadow place to the next, opening long
forgotten doors into closets, new found
rooms that lead to other worlds, darker
places where the walls sweat and the all
in black man behind me raises his arm
holding the long wide bladed knife
as if to strike as another door opens
and a new phase of this hide and seek game
for keeps, begins.
