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.