Three Working-Class Poems

Longing for Power

It’s to work, to home, to work, to home, to work to death.

Sunshine deficient, happy deficient, and smile deficient.

They die with a brain full of unanswered power.

Their lives asked for power.

Their deaths asked for power.

The workers struggle still.

The love of hope is a stimulant.

Man cannot live on hope.

Machines govern the bodies

but not the minds of workers.

They work a double with stupid sleepiness.

No one tells the story of their soul.

Souls filled with the longing for love.

No one tells of their heroic unselfishness,

for family, friends, and fellow workers.

They represent heart kindness and hopeless discomfort.

Maintaining Sanity

.08 means you are legally drunk.

It would take ten times that amount

to wash away the workday hardships.

It’s not enough to drown their intolerable solitude.

Desperate drinking can become a mental band-aid.

A working-class bar features the drunken

chorus of men fresh from hellfire.

Nourishing their battered souls.

and the thankless coarseness of their life

These spirits give them more comfort,

than the rich man’s minister on Sunday.

The Workplaces and Prisons Where Art Hides

Many workers in factories and inmates in prison

have a passion for art, words, and beauty.

Happy are those whose agony in their brains

is put in touch with their fingers,

to express themselves in some form of art.

They scream out as babies cry for food or help.

They scream as they are living death and soul starvation.

They need to put pen to paper or paint to canvas,

to expose their purpose, passion, and pain.

Many beautiful unknown and unspoken

things are lost in the passing of each soul to eternity.

We should have art galleries in factories and prisons.

We should have wakes for the living.