Retail Worker’s Lament: An Original Poem

Retail Worker’s Lament        by Patrick Ryanball

(after Elliott Kahlil Wilson’s Wedding Vows)  Note: These are not the intended line breaks

I like being stepped on.  I have no need for personal space.   Feel free to reach across me without saying a word.  I want that.  Assume I will move for you like a weather vane moves for the wind.  That your time is more valuable than mine.  Assume I’m uneducated.  That I have nothing better to give to the world but my cracked and soiled hands.  All my time.   Emptied for you to fill.

Please call me a strange name even though I wear a name tag like a clear day wears sunlight and the night pins on the moon.   And go ahead, ask me where the bananas are, I will tell you with some joy born out of pithy revenge that they are the bright yellow things right in front of you, and the both of us will laugh.

I have nothing better to do right now than to serve you.  I’m always ready to go the extra mile.  I’ll do it with a smile slapped across my face.  I’m as flexible as taffy.  Stretch me as far as I can go.  I am not yet broken.   And pay no mind to the mess you’re making.  Once you walk away, it vanishes you know.

Minimum wage is just fine.  In fact, I wouldn’t accept anything less.  I’m not interested in paying my bills this month.  Let me work for the holy gift of health insurance and fair pay.  I can wait years.   I’m as patient as a fire alarm for it.  I will lose my house for this job.  My dignity.  My free time.  All of my relationships.   I am that committed to this company.

Want to know my retirement plan?  I will work up to the day I die, poor and anonymous.

For Those With Ears To Hear: An Original Poem

For Those With Ears To Hear     by Patrick Ryanball

Listen,      things are not as whole as they seem.   There are broken

pieces of everything filling the half-lit streets

all across America.

Churches with cracked foundations.  See how they settle

for anything.   Talking snakes, a boat full of two of everything,

a man who lived inside a whale, and that other beast

we call the protestant work ethic.

I say most who worship under steeples worship with their eyes closed.

Their sight narrow      their ears hushed

to the screaming this half-whole world makes.

But to those able to hear, there is one resounding voice

scratching at their ears.  Over and over again

it says   This world

at best       is half way glorious.

The Daily Muse 07.31.08

…I would like to beg you dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.” — Rainer Maria Rilke, 1903 in Letters to a Young Poet