Building a Week

When you are a worker you give yourself over

To tellers-of-you-what-to-do,

Repetitive labor makes thought a Mars Rover

While memorized muscle slams through,

With each passing hour your laborer’s tower

Gets storey’d with stories unmeek,

Through Monday past Hump Day as your superpower

Assembles a Full-Time-Paid-Week.

..

Afterword: for two and a half years I’ve earned money as a prep cook with physical labor, slicing tomatoes and chicken and carne asada, making Bloody Mary mix eight gallons at a time, portioning ranchero sauce (messy until you learn how) and carnitas (greasy no matter how well you know how) and refried beans and Spanish rice and precise weights of lunchmeats wrapped in “day bags” labeled with the day of the week by which they must be either used or discarded, usually done fifty at a time. And there’s a lot of other stuff like that, all depending on the orders of the day. It is satisfying and exhausting work for this septuagenarian and I’m grateful to be capable of doing it, but I do SO look forward to my days off.