2 poems inspired by jobs in Welly

"Jobbing home greased in a tunnel of week" (irregular dactylic lines collaged with iambic quatrain)

The weather is inside and out of the kitchen
The hills of Wellington washed out with glare,
At four in the morning. The sun, when it rises,
The colors silenced brightly, palely, when
Awakens my eyes, which were dreaming of kitchens
A tunnel of monsoon inserts its layer
And of paying attention to slicing le pain * [*Fr. the bread]
Of fog, mist, cloud, and rain: men in a pen
As the heat makes me sweat and the wind darkens me

“Kitchenhand” (heroic couplets collaged with iambic bimeter quatrain)

I’ve finally gotten rid of social skills;
I have more space, more freedom, than the shills
And slaves I know, more empathy for minds
In bodies, for the thousand types of kinds,
The slaves and shills.
My silence jobs here, in this older place
Than any I have jobbed, with its calm pace,
Apparently smoothed into quietude,
Contrasting with the jobs that I have rued
To pay the bills
And taking little of my useful time.
A supervisor sprinkles sprigs of thyme
On racks of lamb strategically rowed-up
Atop greens, kumaras for men to sup
And hit the hills
Amidst an alcoholic glaze, perhaps
Of cider, dark-brown stout, gold beer, their laps
Warm with two leaning thighs or cold as space,
Cold as the way these live without a trace.
Politeness kills

* I don't approve of making money off of poetry... Even if I did approve of commercial poetry, it would still be almost impossible to make a living off of it, which is good. Part of the strength of poetry is, after all, the fact that careerist & ladder-climbing/pushing-shoving people are less likely to migrate to it; they would rather migrate to other professions which offer them higher dividends. As a consequence, those who write poetry are insulated from consciously or unconsciously writing what will "sell", which makes poetry at least one-eyed in the land of the blind. As Emily Dickinson wrote, "Reduce no noble spirit to disgrace of price".

As a corollary to not making money off of poetry, a poet must often -- as is quite natural and 'lemons/lemonade' useful -- simultaneously do work unrelated to poetry which pays the bills; this situation affords the poet new vantage points. The above poems represent products composed as a result of such new vantage points.

Both poems involve the collage of formal constituents. The modern world, with all of its simultaneous mediums of communication & sudden juxtapositions, is itself a collage. The atmosphere of the poems is an attempt to suggest pregnant menace without any of the standard tropes thereof.