Do I not have a hundred poets around me
in this factory?
Throwing down the back gates of their trucks at lunch
to scream, "EEEEHOLA!" and spit
on asphalt and bare their teeth at each other shouting
about women and tequila
and car engines
wearing spotless felt fedora hats as they dip brass parts
into fuming tanks of solvent all day
looking
at red sunsets over LA skyscrapers through machine heads
and compressed air pipes and rolled-open tin doors
they sweat
down their backs and wave their arms
in rolled-up sleeves and dream of crap tables in Laughlin
and beautiful Mexican girls walking down Broadway
and old
Civil War pistols and plaster
their toolboxes with pictures of boxers who are afraid
of nothing was there ever
poetry
if it is not in their eyes as they stride toward their cars
at quitting time in each fingertip
they have managed not to cut off after a lifetime
next to razor-sharp steel edges
who
will ever write a better poem than the tattoos
on the backs of their necks
or the lines
on their hands weathered and carved with the sliding
of a million bars of steel
off the backs of flatbed trucks?




This poem is one of the bus-stop poems specially commissioned by centrifugalforces to be read on
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