jonberger

This is a perfect time to look inward;
take a good hard view
as to how you are
and make an investment in incessant improvement.
Just make everything better.

This is the time to do it:
The shoes.
Gotta go.
Clean the smudges off your nose.
Get rid of errant hairs.

Mercilessly review you
and decide why you were judged lacking.
Ensure that is never deemed so again.
Make it that everyone finds you
more than enough
in the future.

Wash the dishes
spic ‘n’ span
never dirty a dish again.
Reconsider eating.
Keep calories to a minimum.
Food may be at a premium now.

You’ve got the time.
Careful that everything passes muster.
Make it so.

You wake on the first day
of your new life.

It is the same time
you always wake up
to the same sunlight
it has ever been
the same grey.

You feel no freer
no less bound
by the chains
of the Man
then you were the day before
to do what you wish
however you may want.

You have your own destiny to pursue now,
though,
and naturally
you think,
the best destiny
is to pursue more sleep.

I will not have an opportunity to apologize to the QA guys
who were assessing my Customer Service cases
giving me lousy scores and putting my job at risk
this last year and a half.
I’ve been judging them for being so one-dimensional
in their thinking
and not often understanding the breadth of my logic.

Now that I’ve been fired
I will never have the chance to let them know
that I’m sorry for not giving them the benefit of the doubt.

I’ll never have the opportunity to speak to them again
so I won’t be able to make up
my prejudicial thinking to those guys
who kept my employment in danger
and left me anxious for half my tenure
at the company I just left.

This bothers me
but not enough
to seek a solution
to the problem at hand.

Really, this couldn’t have come at a better season.
The dead of winter is the perfect time
for me to be holed up at home
with little to do.
I can focus incessantly on house projects
while concerning myself with how to save money.
I can look through the things in my apartment
seeing what I can burn
what I can sell
and what I cannibalize.
This will work out well, I am certain.

My phone has been dying,
so I will have less excuse to go out and do things
being away from my charger
with income being so delightfully tight right now.

Creativity will no doubt go through the roof
as anxiety creeps up
up up up up up
and upward again.

Finally, desperate exercises in positivity
will help me practice my imagination.
I will end this season of dread
far stronger than I entered it
and with a very tinder-tinged home,
I’m sure.

Being smarter than I’m supposed to be
got me kicked out of a job at a college
where I was escorted out
because I was pretty damned stupid.

I snuck into an old office
after I had changed departments
to make copies of a zine.
When the guard asked if I was supposed to be there,
I grinned and said,
“I’ve got the key, right?”

He realized that wasn’t an answer
and checked up on me.
I was confronted at my new desk on Monday morning
and a different security guard watched me clear out my desk
and exit the building.
That was the first time that happened to me
but I soon got used to it.

I did stop publishing zines at work, though,
when businesses stopped having big copy machines everywhere.

In one prior company
my position had partially been
to root out scams
that customers were pulling,
so when they fired me
(I felt) unjustly,
I was in an excellent position
to consider scams against them.

The details are irrelevant
but run something like this:
buy lots of tickets for their multiple products
across different lines of business,
then collect among them the common winning elements
which they had not created a rule
that you could not mix and match across.
Since nobody knew that Product X
and Product C were sold by the same body
no one else knew to combine them to get a winning bingo
except a couple of notable folks.

I was a notable folks
and I would win prizes on a regular basis
for a reasonable amount of time
while I was unfairly unemployed
and even afterward into my next job.

It made me feel better about myself
when I felt like I’d been taken advantage of.
It felt like things were being evened out.

If but I had such hidden knowledge
in my current situation.

Thinking on it
it’s amazing that this hasn’t happened earlier,
with a toppling organization
shedding staff
and a humbled employee
constantly on the razor’s edge of judgement
always being reviewed,
always being questioned.

It’s a wonder you’ve lasted
as long as you have.

You should be congratulated
on your reign of errors
lasting this long
and be glad
that you needn’t have to worry
about the target on your back anymore.

You can sleep at night
and rest easy
that perhaps the company’s cash flow
can at last go positive.

I was not clear on what the company did
when I got the interview
which might have been the point of their vague name.

I got the job
and soon learned
their name hid their insidious designs.
I worked for an evil company in the telecom sector.

The money was the best I’d made, though,
so I worked hard
and was proud of how I did.

I was not proud of the company.
They probably weren’t either
and changed their name.

Their profits rose.
The phone companies tried to rein them in
but not hard
because everyone profited from their actions.

I did well there.
I rose.
I talked shit.
I got canned.

I stopped caring
about the work I did
and started to keep my head down
just to do my job.
I stopped speaking ill of my employer
whatever they did.
I still get fired.

There’s probably a lesson there:
Evil’s gonna evil to the world
whatever you do about it.
Evil’s gonna evil to you, too.

The hours between notification
that there will be layoffs
and word about the security
of your own position
are not productive hours.

Those are hours
where you wonder
about life
justice
futility
friendship
time
peace
and vengeance.

Other things may flit through as well
but work is probably not high
among the priorities.

It is a wonder
that the office makes such announcements
at all.

There was a time
when I would go questing
out on the streets of the City
for a lobster tail
and the world would have no knowledge
of what I sought.

Those were frustrating days.

On a bicycle adventure
aimlessly riding around Staten Island,
I found Bruno’s Bakery
and I bought a flakey cream-filled construction
with powdered sugar that stuck
to my sweaty shirt as the cream and crust
would enter me as quickly as I could swallow.

It was a lobster tail
and I was in love.
I needed more of this thing
but I couldn’t bike out to the Island
on the regular
so I looked for other bakeries
that could serve me the stuff that I craved.

I was not easily satisfied.

No one knew what I was talking about
when I named the delicacy.
“Lobster tail? This is a bakery!”
There was no other name for the thing.
It looks a little like the triangular sfogliatelle
which you can find at most Italian bakeries
but the lobster tail doesn’t appear all the time
– even at the Italian spots.

I kept looking.
I kept failing.
It turns out the tail wasn’t too popular,
so the places that did make it
made it on weekends alone when more people would buy.

I could find it at special locations
like Veniero’s and a couple of smaller places
in Little Italy.
It took a lot to get me the goods.
My sweet spot could eventually be found
but it still took some work
for me to get my fill.