The Earth and the Stars in the Palm of Our Hand by Fred Voss
The Earth and the Stars in the Palm of Our Hand Poems by Fred Voss Foreword by Len McCluskey Edited and introduced by Mike Quille ‘Resist much: obey little’ - Walt Whitman
2016
First published 2016 by Culture Matters, an imprint of Manifesto Press. Culture Matters aims to promote progressive arts and culture as part of the cultural struggle for socialism. See www.culturematters.org.uk Some of these poems have been previously published in: Blue Collar Review, Dwang, Nerve Cowboy, The Morning Star, and Communist Review. Copyright Š Fred Voss All rights reserved Cover image by Jon Schwockert Print by Evoprint and Design Ltd. ISBN: 978-1-907464-10-2
Contents Foreword by Len McCluskey ....................................................6 Introduction by Mike Quille ......................................................8 Steel-Toed Soul ........................................................................13 Interview #29 ............................................................................14 5-Minute Tough Guys ..............................................................16 The Teeth Of Jesus ....................................................................18 The Fist Or The Butterfly..........................................................20 The Bluebirds Are Asking Us ..................................................22 What Is A Hammer Compared To The Heart Of A Brother..............................................................................24 Red White and Blue Urn ..........................................................26 Happy 4th Of July As Guevara And Zapata Burn On Their Backs ..............................................................................28 Bus Wheel Bar Stool Brothers ................................................30 Wedding Rings And Tombstones ..............................................32 Solidarity In Hard Times ..........................................................34 Concrete Battlefield ..................................................................36 Hammers Loud As Gunshots ....................................................38 Putting The Hills Back Together ..............................................40 Carrying Our Babies And Crankcases In Their Arms ..............42 The Earth And The Stars In The Palm Of Our Hand ................44
Foreword ‘Most people ignore most poetry because most poetry ignores most people’ The late Adrian Mitchell was surely right when he said this. Although we all know examples of art which have helped to build and sustain social movements, a lot of poetry written in the past has not meant much to ordinary working people. It has not adequately reflected their lives and feelings and thoughts, or provided much inspiration, strength and comfort in their lives. But things have changed over the last few decades. The economic and political victories of the labour movement in the 20th century led to much higher standards of postwar education, housing and income for most people in Britain, Ireland and the U.S. This has meant new generations of poets, writers and artists have emerged who are rooted in our class, the working class. They speak clearly, skilfully and entertainingly about our feelings and our thoughts, our worries and our joys, our hopes and our dreams. Fred Voss is an outstanding example of this kind of worker poet. He’s been a metal machinist on the west coast of the U.S. for over 30 years, using numerically controlled lathes to make aircraft parts and fixtures for welders. He’s witnessed the effects of capitalism, especially the aggressive, profiteering version we know as neoliberalism, on working people. He’s seen how the globalisation of production and unplanned immigration has driven down wages and divided workers. He’s seen and suffered the routine oppressions and alienations of the workplace, the petty bullying and constant pressure from managers, the socially useless and indeed dangerous nature of the products of his workshop. And he’s seen how the capitalist nature of the relations of production – the selling of labour for the profit of others – can distort and degrade human relationships, leading to an unhealthy, macho and miserable culture of fear, violence, drink, drugs and depression. 6
Britain, Ireland and many other capitalist countries in Europe are becoming more like the U.S., in several ways. Everyone can see the growing inequality, the precarious and low paid nature of employment, the housing crisis across the country, the divisions and inequalities between social classes, the problems of obesity, drink and drugs, and the sheer everyday struggle to pay the bills for many working people. In this situation, Fred Voss is like a prophet. He warns us of the consequences of the way we live, he tells truth to power, and he inspires us with a positive vision of a possible – and desirable – socialist future. Unite is proud to support this pamphlet from Culture Matters. We hope you all enjoy reading the poems, and feel inspired by them to become active and aware trade unionists, and more creative, critical citizens. Len McCluskey General Secretary Unite the Union Autumn 2016
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Introduction I want to change the world, I want to strike the spark or kick the pebble that will start the fire or the avalanche that will change the world a little. - Fred Voss Fred Voss wants to help change the world through his poetry because of the dire situation of the American working class. Real wages have stagnated or declined for decades, huge inequalities between rich and poor have developed, the top 1% of the U.S. population own 35% of the wealth, and bonuses on Wall Street are more than double the total annual pay of all Americans on the federal minimum wage. Against a background of globalisation, de-industrialisation and the loss of jobs overseas, there is mass incarceration, police violence on Black youth, and attacks on trade unions and on the social safety net. Mortality rates amongst white working class Americans have got worse, for the first time since records began. Men and women are dying early, from drugs, drink and violence, including suicide. What is going on? Why is this happening? It's happening because the rich and powerful American ruling class, running the richest and most powerful country in the history of the world, need American working people less than ever before. They're either on the economic scrapheap, or on their way there. There are simply not enough jobs for them, and the few jobs around are increasingly badly paid. They are struggling against the legalised robbery of their labour and their health, wealth and happiness. Gridlock in Congress and an ineffectual President has led to working class desperation being expressed through voting for the dangerous, delusional fantasies of Donald Trump. The USA is not really a democracy. It is not really a land of freedom and opportunity, and does not even pay adequate wages for hard, long hours of work. It is a plutocracy, run 8
by wealthy corporate elites. For growing numbers of poor working class men and women there is only the increasingly complete subordination of their labour to capital, built on centuries of exploitation, institutionalised racism and violence and legitimated by an irresponsible culture of individualism and the violent defence of self-interest. Fred Voss has worked in machine shops for over 30 years. He knows that the 'inevitable as doom' ticks of the workplace clock are horribly real signifiers of oppression and exploitation, in a workplace ‘ringing of hammers loud as gunshots’. Not because of the work itself but because of the alienating conditions of employment which people work under, ‘as the unions are busted and our wages fall’. Voss sees and expresses the actual evil of capitalist production, but also the potential for good under different arrangements. And he expresses it clearly, lyrically, without losing sight of the material basis of life, and the equally straightforward way things could be different – for example, how the products he's making could be socially useful rather than destructive. This dialectical contrast is expressed subtly but strikingly, for example in Wedding Rings and Tombstones, where he describes he and his fellow workers making frames for stretchers carrying men off bloody battlefields bomb bay doors dropping bombs that burn women alive in hospital beds we cut steel holders for candles burning above the head of a mother praying the operation will save her daughters' sight Voss's understanding of capitalist production also connects the energy of work in his machine shop to progressive political values. See how in The Fist or the Butterfly we move smoothly 9
from the sweaty, oily detail of metalwork, the strength displayed by men competing in a machine shop, to a better, more feminine strength: the real strength in the shoes of Rosa Parks firmly planted on the floor as she sits in the front of the bus By interpreting the world in this way, Voss is helping to change it. His poems sing out hope and possibility to us in the same way Whitman's poems and Kerouac's prose, and Ginsberg's poems and The Doors' music, did for earlier generations. Do not think that the clarity of expression in Voss's poems is artless. They may look like chopped-up prose, but read them aloud and you will hear their sinuous, resilient rhythms, winding onwards and gathering force, a Whitmanesque river of ideas and images. See how each poem develops an idea from an initial striking title and first few lines, and flows from that spring of inspiration towards an always memorable resolution. Poems about the experience of interview, and being hired by bosses and supervisors like a commodity, are followed by meditations on the various alienations in the workplace, worker and product, and between worker and worker, especially the tensions between whites and non-whites. Voss notes the natural solidarity amongst immigrant workers and contrasts it with the individualised rage and anger of indigenous white workers, and the potential for all these different streams of humanity to be united in solidarity. This unity encompasses women. It includes the political strength and determination of women like Rosa Parks, but also their emotional work. In Solidarity in Hard Times, Voss expresses the potential for personal relationships to provide a sense of solidarity and solace:
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In America the unions might be busted and socialism a dirty word but at least Frank gets to be married to a beautiful comrade in arms. Bubbling up all the time is a sense, a prayer, a vision of how different things can be, until we near the end of the collection and feel the full force of The Earth and The Stars in the Palm of Our Hand. This is one of Voss's most complex and successful poems. It weaves themes of class-based division and workers beaten down by the political and business elites, with utopian aspiration and a willed determination to achieve human reconciliation through socially useful, unalienated work. It is a critique of capitalism, and a vision of communism: why not a job joyous as one of these poems I write a job where each turn of a wrench each ring of a hammer makes my soul sing out glad for each drop of sweat rolling down my back because the world has woken up and stopped worshiping money and power and fame Like William Blake, Fred Voss combines the precision and realism born of years of skilled craftworking with a sweeping, lyrical imagination. And like Blake, his vision arises from years of reflection on work, on the condition of the working class, and on the dreadful but alterable material realities of the world around him. His poetry is rooted in factory life on the west coast of California, but rears up and stretches our imaginations as we read it, taking us across time and space. It lives in the here and now and works to the tick of the factory clock, but also transcends our 'cold competitive time'. 11
It is prophetic, with a deep spiritual content, but is always focused on the material point of production, and the way human relationships are conditioned by the relations of capitalist production. It connects and contrasts the inherent, present harshness of class conflict under capitalism with the ultimate, future promise of communism. It is a 'warmer way to live' as he says in one of his poems. Voss tirelessly lifts his poetic hammer and strikes the spark of revolution into our hearts and minds. Culture Matters is very proud to publish his powerful, prophetic poetry, and we hope you enjoy reading it. Mike Quille Editor Culture Matters Autumn 2016.
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Steel-Toed Soul When I was 12 I wore brown wing-tip shoes to church where they said Jesus rose again from the dead now I wear steel-toed boots to work in a machine shop where heaven is a quit-work whistle sending us machinists out the door with paychecks to be born again under a blue sky once my 12-year-old neck chafed in summer heat under a starched white collar as I knelt before the altar and sipped the blood of Christ in burgundy wine and tasted his body wafer-thin on my tongue now blood flows from my fingers sliced by razor-sharp cutters as I sweat in torn T-shirt slicing steel into parts so the boss doesn’t send me to the street where I could starve a bird on a telephone wire outside the tin door of the factory sings to my 63-year-old soul when once I held a hymnal as my first beard sprouted on my chin and I sang about the blessings of God college and my clean hands on a scalpel or a law book or around a university lectern and all the success in the world lay ahead for me now I lace up my steel-toed boots and grip a tool steel wrench in my dirty fist and think of those brown wing-tip shoes I once wore when Jesus rose from the dead each Easter and go on carving my living out of cutting steel real as this hard hard world and finding what blessings I can in these poems. 13
Interview #29 The supervisor has my job application in his hands I sit in a little chair facing the supervisor’s desk and the supervisor pours over my application like a dentist looking for cavities a detective looking for crimes I haven’t worked in a year I hear the machines pounding and sawing and buzzing outside the office’s big glass windows but I’ve almost forgotten what it’s like to stand in front of a machine and grip its handles and pull down a paycheck my guts squirm my legs ache I’m in a cold sweat trying to have the answers to the questions before the supervisor asks them and he looks up and studies me like a bug in a jar an amoeba on a microscope slide and I want to yell at him, “Look, I’m a human being I had a mother and a father who loved me don’t I have a right to eat to have a bed and a roof over my head and a mailbox and a toilet and an oven and a chair to sit in with dignity and watch the sun go down safe from rain and madmen’s knives in alleys and jail cells all I want to do is work all I want to do is give you 10 hours a day and do whatever you ask so I don’t have to end up starving in the street” 14
but the supervisor is calm he picks a piece of steak out from between his teeth and flicks it at the floor and studies me waiting for me to crack under a bright white light in fireplace factories magnet factories gumball machine fire hydrant stovepipe manhole cover gasket skateboard chair trashcan flashlight parking meter bowling ball factories across this land it is the same supervisors with big bellies and cold beady eyes leaning back in soft leather chairs behind desks holding our applications and our lives in their hands.
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5-Minute Tough Guys The men from the offices are out on the shop floor 10 minutes before quitting time watching us to see if we are putting our tools away 4 or 5 minutes before the clean-up bell rings and talking instead of working and they fold their arms across their chests and puff out their chests and stick their jaws out to try to look tough and threaten us but their feet are not sure on the concrete floor we have stood on this floor for decades planted our feet rock-solid and sure as we lifted 100-pound vise shoved 1-ton bar of heat-treated filthy steel gritted our teeth and stood firm and felt white-hot blast furnace flame lick our lips the concrete floor is in our bones our groans our shouts of “Fuck!” to the tin ceiling 70 feet above our midnight dreams our never-say-die smiles we have passed out cigars at the birth of our baby boys on it stuffed dollar bills into collection boxes for men who have lost fingers to machine blades on it laughed until our whole body shook because if we didn’t we might go insane on it collapsed short of breath from 50 years of hammering and hoisting and aching and sweating on it and gone on 16
and on how could those men from the plush-carpeted offices with their soft hands and their soft souls stand on it with feet planted rock-solid and sure like ours and as they stare at us trying to look tough their feet fidget on the hard concrete floor and give them away as they shift their legs and blink their eyes and finally give up trying to scare us standing firm and tough and true on a rock-hard gouged and pitted stained-with-oil-and-sweatand-human-blood concrete floor isn’t something you can learn to do in 5 minutes it takes a lifetime.
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The Teeth Of Jesus It is January 4th 2016 and we file back into the factory where the little plastic Christmas tree on top of a workbench sits unplugged and about to be put back into the storage room Christmas is over and Rex says, “You’ve heard of sleepwalking? Well, I’m sleepworking” and punches in and walks over to his machine to turn it on once we had unions once we got raises once everything we wore wasn’t made in China or Vietnam and our children could afford to move out and start their own lives and we didn’t have to choose between surgery and bankruptcy and we have been sleeping in over the holidays and now it is a cold 6 am and hard to wake up on a concrete floor “Back to reality,” Marlin says and shakes his head and drops his timecard into the timeclock no more Santa no more 2-year-olds laughing under Christmas trees no more “It’s a Wonderful Life” or “A Christmas Carol” where Scrooge wakes up Christmas morning a new man and doubles Bob Cratchit’s wages and we grit our teeth and grab our wrenches turn nuts down onto bolts clamp steel we cut into skyscraper beam streetcar wheel elevator cable bulldozer tooth we need a Christmas as real as steel a Christmas that can put dollars in our pockets 18
save our houses our marriages our sanity send out kids to college give the men in the alleys beds and I look over at the little plastic Christmas tree with the little plastic manger and the little plastic Jesus under it as Bob the maintenance man begins stuffing them back into a box we need a Christmas as real as the teeth of the saw Jesus the carpenter lifted to cut wood into roofs over all our heads.
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The Fist Or The Butterfly I push 2 aluminum slabs propped against a red iron upright dolly through the factory 2 slabs ¾” thick x 18” wide x 4 feet long weighing 100 pounds leaned against my chest as my fist grips the red iron upright dolly handle and I push with one hand the 100 pounds and the dolly’s 2 wheels roll across a gray concrete floor and I swivel the dolly and the 2 slabs leaned against my chest past workbenches and wooden crates and steel I-beams to show all the machinists how strong I am when you work every day with men who might suddenly fire a fist out of nowhere into your face it pays to make a show of strength but I wish at age 62 I could tell these men the real strength is in the curve of the petal of a Van Gogh sunflower the stunted broken legs of a dwarfed Lautrec rising from a Paris suicide floor to turn off the gas and paint the kicking legs of cancan dancers the real strength is in the shoes of Rosa Parks firmly planted on the floor as she sits in the front of the bus Galileo looking through his telescope telling us the universe does not revolve around us I want to tell these machinists in this factory the real strength 20
is not fists or 18” necks or weightlifter chests or the bomber planes we make the real strength is the swoop of the butterfly wing around the rose the real strength died on the cross said, “I have a dream” I push this 100 pounds of aluminum slabs resting against my chest across a football-field-long building to prove what a man I still am but at age 62 I am so tired of flexing muscles and closing fists and pretending the real strength can’t lie in the beautiful truth of a poem.
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The Bluebirds Are Asking Us We settle in at our machines 1 year, 2 years 10 years and we still don’t know each other really we make door latch train wheel scalpel bulldozer bucket tooth pieces of a world made of glass and steel and plastic and I-beam and drywall and pipe and smokestack and tin wall and chrome and computer keyboard but we don’t know what’s in each other’s hearts as we talk about Super Bowl score cubic centimeter engine size back operations dentures acid trips spaghetti and I-pad videos of motorcycle riders with cameras on their helmets crashing head-on into trucks we know how many cylinders we have in our engines how many frogs we feed to our pet pythons but not what we dream of at 3 am not what our fathers told us on their deathbeds not what we feel when we let down our guard and think of the wounds inside us the gone loves the telephones that never ring the sons that never write the roads never taken the magic we felt when we were 3 and our dads took us downtown to see the store front window trains at Christmas the bat we swung in High School we thought would take us all the way to the major leagues the first love we thought would never end we share micrometers and tool steel squares and adjustable parallels but never the feelings
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like wild rivers raging inside us all day we open toolboxes lunch pails but never our hearts as our heads go gray and the high rises rise and the trains haul 1-ton bars of steel and bluebirds on telephone wires outside sing their songs looking through the big open tin factory door at us asking what good is our world of machines if we’ve no music in our hearts.
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What Is A Hammer Compared To The Heart Of A Brother? The white machinists lock up their tools in their toolboxes each night they etch their names with electric etching guns into their wrenches and calipers and micrometers and hammers and protractors and lock them away in their toolboxes each night with latches and sometimes big heavy padlocks and even chains counting drills and chuck keys and cutting taps with an eye always peeled for thieves they believe in jail cells electric chairs hellfire loan nothing and paste big stickers saying “NO!� to the insides of their toolbox lids as the Mexican machinists hand each other their tools with big smiles on their faces leave their toolbox drawers open and never lock their toolboxes and sing old socialist songs from the revolution south of the border old mariachi love songs their grandparents sing in old East L.A. houses where 4 generations of their family live together sharing everything what is a wrench compared to the faith they have they will take care of each other what is a hammer compared to the heart of a brother what is a toolbox full of tools for the seas the moon 24
the rain that makes this earth green if not us all as rice is thrown at weddings and children kneel at great grand parents’ deathbeds and crucifixes shine in the palms of old Mexican ladies ready for heaven as Emiliano Zapata’s eyes burn and Che Guevara camps in the hills and the white machinists grow bitter clutching their tools as their billionaires lock billions away in bank vaults and the polar ice caps melt and the land they took from the Mexicans burns in global warming drought and the Mexicans smile handing each other their tools and their hearts.
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Red White And Blue Urn These conservative Republican machinists shouting lines from Rush Limbaugh and flying flags from the back of their pickup trucks what do they get from electing these conservative Republican senators and congressmen who vote against raising the minimum wage vote to cut back unemployment food stamps health care housing environmental protection build more bombers give tax cuts to the rich raise the pay of CEOs to 400 times the average worker’s pay do they get to wave their American flag a little harder on the 4th of July shout out the words of The Star Spangled Banner a little louder at the baseball game close their fist and shake it whenever Vladimir Putin’s or a Muslim leader’s face appears on television while their grandsons live with them because their grandsons can’t afford an apartment and their unemployed sons are on drugs on skid row do their hands hurt less because they work on into their 70s because they can’t get a raise is the fear less paralyzing the next time they have to lift a 100-pound vise that could wrench their back and end their working days forever when they have no money in the bank no pension no house no hospital bed to rest in they stick out their chests as they strut around their machines and whistle The Stars and Stripes Forever on the day after the Republicans take over the Senate
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will the flag staunch the wound when their daughter sits bleeding to death in a packed emergency ward because she has no health care will it help to have a red white and blue urn to hold the ashes of their son after he drinks himself to death because he has no hope of making more than $9 an hour when will these conservative machinists wake up when will they want more than red white and blue words when will they want opportunity and dignity and freedom as real as the wrenches in their hands the sweat on their backs the lives they have given building a country where they no longer count?
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Happy 4th Of July As Guevara And Zapata Burn On Their Backs I see them Mexicans or Guatemalans or Chileans on machines with the face of Che Guevara or Emiliano Zapata on the backs of their shirts never a word about revolution do I hear come from their mouths as they stand wiping grease off their fingers between machines or in bathrooms or sit on wooden benches eating apples against the red brick wall at break not one raise for years they ride a train or a bus or a bicycle to work because they cannot afford a car lose teeth lose hope their daughters will ever go to college or things get better as they work until their fingers are numb to keep food on the table for their families the eyes of Che Guevara and Emiliano Zapata burn on their shirts sparkle and burn like the eyes of tigers that can never be stopped or caged and these men from Mexico or Guatemala or Chile stand between machines or in bathrooms or sit on benches against the red brick wall at break and talk of soccer games and mariachi singers and V-8 fuel-injected engines and wrestling grips and astronauts and jalapeno sauce and tango dances but never 28
do I hear one word about revolution from these men the eyes of Emiliano Zapata and Che Guevara burn on their shirts burn like Beethoven’s 9th Picasso’s GUERNICA Spartacus’s sword Paul Revere’s horse’s gallop Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence pen Van Gogh’s sunflower Galileo’s telescope the yell and raised fist of each man who stormed The Bastille the blood of each man who ever fell for freedom yet never have I heard one word of revolt from these men who don’t dare lose their jobs or open their mouths as the eyes of Emiliano Zapata and Che Guevara burn on their backs.
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Bus Wheel Bar Stool Brothers Down the street from my factory they make safes men spend their lives making tool steel safe doors 3 inches thick and combination locks for them there is a magnet factory around the corner across from a cemetery air nozzle motorcycle exhaust pipe gasket fireplace factories down these streets where men follow the straight lines of highways to work at the same machines all their lives each making a piece of this world barber pole manhole cover parking meter post bathtub hair dryer scalpel bus wheel bar stool bed spring fish tank rifle sight jackhammer there are so many things in this world and we make them and we look across chain-link fences into the backs of each other’s factories and feel like different species we are aircraft men automobile men oxygen tank men with special 3-foot-long scales or sheet metal micrometers or monkey wrenches but we eat the same lettuce lift the same baby granddaughters onto our knees hope our sons are not shot on battlefields 10,000 miles away stand over the same dirt as it is shoveled into the graves of our fathers carry the same long-stemmed rose down a sidewalk toward the love of our life wonder why stars and raindrops on the end of pine needles shine
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somehow all these steering wheels and ship horns and barber chairs we make come together to make a world why should we not be brothers we all ache in the back grunt as we lift a heavy load sweat in front of a blast furnace flame stare at the tin wall of a factory and wonder why our lives are hidden from the world why should we not be brothers when without us there would be no world at all?
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Wedding Rings And Tombstones We carved the stones for cathedrals when men believed God was as real as a redwood tree we hammered the red-hot rivets into bridges spanning wild rivers after Nietzsche said God was dead we made frames for stretchers carrying men off bloody battlefields bomb bay doors dropping bombs that burn women alive in hospital beds we cut steel holders for candles burning above the head of a mother praying the operation will save her daughter’s sight feet of 8th-story hotel bathtubs where opera divas bathe hinges for cell doors that close on men who must wait for the electric chair combs to shape the curl across the forehead of the movie star who will soon cry as she holds the best actress Oscar world wars come and go Atlantic City casinos rise and fall newsreels show the blinking eyes of starved-toskin-and-bone Auschwitz survivors Neil Armstrong sinks a boot into moon dust as we make bedsprings and scalpels trumpet mouthpieces and bulldozer teeth a frying pan for Greta Garbo’s scrambled eggs and a cattle prod for a torturer Alexander the Great cries because he has no more worlds to conquer Hitler shoots himself in his bunker and people still need screwdrivers 32
and hairbrushes and we pick up our hammers our wrenches our chisels as the sun rises at 6:31 am and the sweat on our backs is still sweat and people still need bowls and wheels and kettledrums the next baby to be born may be the man to stop global warming or push the button beginning World War 3 but the world will still need us to make wedding rings and tombstones.
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Solidarity In Hard Times One Sunday morning when Frank and Jane are having tea and Frank is feeling especially noble recalling his days in the steel mill he says, “I used to shove 30 tons of steel a week into the mouth of a white-hot blast furnace….” waiting for Jane to nod in awe and sympathy but Jane recalling her days in the go-go bars says, “I used to carry 4 pitchers of beer in each hand all night serving the drunks….” “The 2-ton drop hammers used to smash down on the concrete floor so hard it quaked like an earthquake and I could barely walk and my stomach rose and my heart leaped --” Frank goes on waiting for Jane to realize the immense ordeal he has endured and survived but Jane says, “My legs were so tired after serving beer and go-go dancing for 10 hours with no break I had to crawl up the stairs to my bedroom at the end of the night….” Frank grips his teacup as hard as a sledgehammer and sticks out his jaw and says, “The drills and the air compressors and the furnaces and the drop hammers were so loud men who worked that steel mill 20 years shook constantly in their fingers and jaws….” but Jane fires back, “Those rock bands were so loud I couldn’t hear for an hour after I left work.” Frank is about to slam his teacup down when he stops and realizes
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Jane’s bosses screamed at her just as much as his bosses ever screamed at him he realizes he’s been stared at by drugged-out knife-carrying biker machinists but Jane had drunken crazy men leer and flirt with her bikini fringe for years he can’t win and Frank gives up and moves over in bed and snuggles up to Jane and puts his arm around her while contentedly sipping hot Earl Grey tea and says, “We’ve had it pretty rough,” and smiles. In America the unions might be busted and socialism a dirty word but at least Frank gets to be married to a beautiful comrade in arms.
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Concrete Battlefield “AFGHANISTAN WAR VETERAN” it says in red letters on 26-year-old new hire Ariel’s baseball-style cap as he lowers his head and the 5-times-magnification-loupe he has stuck into his eye socket toward the aircraft wing actuator in his palm inspecting it with outside micrometer for a plus or minus 5 thousandths of an inch blueprint thickness dimension he must hold until Carl yells something from the next machine trying to joke with Ariel again like he does with all the machinists at the machines around him and Ariel stiffens like he’s been shot in the back and drops the wing actuator and pops the loupe out of his eye socket and strides toward Carl and yells, “Fuckin’ with me again, huh Carl?!” trying to smile and go along with the joke but looking like he might strangle Carl as we all try to laugh like it’s all a joke but the laughter sticks in our throats we are all veterans us men aging into our 60s who wonder if we will ever be able to retire in this crashed economy full of underwater houses and billionaires filling bank vaults maybe we haven’t faced enemy fire like Ishmael but we are all tired to death and we drop our heads and look at our machines and the parts in our hands as Carl tries to make another joke but knows instantly it isn’t funny and wipes the smile off his face and lowers his head and trembles 36
as we all hold our breath and look down at the concrete floor and hope no punches are thrown or guns pulled we are all veterans fighting all our lives as the unions are busted and our wages fall and someone says, “Carl’s just jokin’, Ariel,” and we all lift our heads and try to put on smiles we are all veterans with bad backs and arthritic knuckles broken dreams and penniless children lost houses and torn t-shirts we haven’t been to Afghanistan but we’ve been inside these tin walls for 35 or 40 years and finally Ariel laughs a long tired laugh happy he didn’t explode as we all join in and the peace returns we are all shell-shocked by this war some of us on battlefields others on concrete floors.
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Hammers Loud As Gunshots This poem was purchased with thousands of droppings of time cards into time clocks a million miles of tire tread rolling across black asphalt in 5:30 am darkness toward factory tin doors ringing of hammers loud as gunshots ticks of time clocks inevitable as doom this poem was earned with stinking black Moly Lube tapping fluid all over my hands earplugs in my ears aches in my fingers and back and shoulder and knee and in my heart so far away from wife snapped cutters sharp as razors shooting splinters past my ear Ishmael went to sea Quixote galloped toward windmills Raskolnikov hid a bloodied axe in his bedroom I put on a hardhat and steel-toed boots and stood in front of a blast furnace flame at midnight and paid for this poem with a thousand nights lonely as steel mill smokestack fire and ex-felons disowned by their mothers and beer cans clutched in my hand like the last hope on earth I shook as 2-ton drop hammers exploded I shook inside I shook on street corners I burned up a mattress under me and rushed outside to gulp air and barely made it but I paid for this poem 38
watching the jaws and fingertips of WW2 heroes tremble over roaring cutting torches Oliver Twist pickpocketed watches Ulysses tied himself to his ship’s mast Hemingway’s old man clubbed the heads of sharks with an oar I earned the lines of this poem in front of a machine as a foreman screamed into my ear like I was a dog and a man from Guatemala with no papers sending his paycheck home to his mother living under a sacred mountain smiled like we were brothers I paid for each word on this paper with grease-blackened fingernails and a heart that will not quit beating with the blood of every man who ever picked up a hammer.
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Putting The Hills Back Together I grab my machine’s handle once when locomotives had opened the West and no white man missed the buffalo it would have been pure pleasure to grab a machine handle make a bulldozer tooth to knock down a hill a propeller for a freighter ship to steam across the Pacific an injection mold to make a million plastic bottles when the machines were making sockets for bulbs to light up the Paris night telegraph and telephone wires to let us talk coast to coast highways so we could roll across this vast land and see our grandfathers before they died it must have been pure pleasure moving a machine head’s belt to a smaller pulley to set the machine in higher gear and raise the spindle rpm so a cutter could leave a shiny diamond-smooth finish on a piece of steel but now as enough atom bombs to blow up the solar system stack and the sea chokes on plastic and filth and dies inching closer to swallowing New York it is harder to grab this machine handle pump lube oil into this machine’s tool steel ways so it can slide and slice brass into valves when we need to make less lights less asphalt less tires less pistons less plastic bottles and lay down our guns
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our drills our spray cans shovels oil derricks dynamite sticks and let the earth heal and I reach out and grab my machine’s handle again and it feels smooth and warm against my palm as I pray someday I can make parts for engines that spew no exhaust bulldozers that will put hills back together rather than tearing them apart bells that will ring out the day we finally find our place among the tigers and roses and worms and gorillas on this precious planet.
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Carrying Our Babies And Crankcases In Their Arms Why do we kneel before a king sitting on a throne with nothing to do why are our magazine covers full of celebrities why is the billionaire born to his wealth leaning on the railing of a cruise ship sailing around the world high class why do we worship his satin hands and the silver spoon in his mouth men who go down into mines crawl under houses carry our garbage clean our chimneys rivet together our airplanes carve our engine blocks stamp out our bed springs serve our meals oil our gears blast holes through hills lay pipe lift loads carry water heave crankcases buff aircraft skins polish shoes stir soup drive trucks across the country through thousands of desolate midnights calibrate scales cut jewels mend socks drill holes down through miles of rock to save miners trapped in cave-ins bail the radioactive water out of melted-down nuclear reactors clean the bed sheets steer the ship crack the nut what is the crown of a king compared to the callouses on their hands the aches in their backs the muscles in their wrists and forearms and thighs and thumbs they charge our batteries slip rings on the fingers of brides crawl under cars touch their fingertips 42
to 440 volts hold dying soldiers in their medic arms fix mainsprings grip needle-nosed files jackhammer handles crucifixes before they storm Normandy Beach what is fame when you can talk a suicide away from the ledge over the phone carry the baby out of the flames cut out the bolts that hold our cities up why should a trumpet blare a fanfare for a king when it can blow a Miles Davis solo so beautifully it saves a thousand lives?
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The Earth And The Stars In The Palm Of Our Hand “Another day in paradise,” a machinist says to me as he drops his time card into the time clock and the sun rises over the San Gabriel mountains and we laugh it’s a pretty good job we have considering how tough it is out there in so many other factories in this era of the busted union and the beaten-down worker but paradise? and we walk away toward our machines ready for another 10 hours inside tin walls as outside perfect blue waves roll onto black sand Hawaiian beaches and billionaires raise martini glasses sailing their yachts to Cancun but I can’t help thinking why not paradise why not a job where I feel like I did when I was 4 out in my father’s garage joyously shaving a block of wood in his vise with his plane as a pile of sweet-smelling wood shavings rose at my feet and my father smiled down at me and we held the earth and the stars in the palm of our hand why not a job joyous as one of these poems I write a job where each turn of a wrench each ring of a hammer makes my soul sing out glad for each drop of sweat rolling down my back because the world has woken up and stopped worshiping money and power and fame
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and because presidents and kings and professors and popes and Buddhas and mystics and watch repairmen and astrophysicists and waitresses and undertakers know there is nothing more important than the strong grip and will of men carving steel like I do nothing more important than Jorge muscling a drill through steel plate so he can send money to his mother and sister living under a sacred mountain in Honduras nothing more noble than bread on the table and a steel cutter’s grandson reaching for the moon and men dropping time cards into time clocks and stepping up to their machines like the sun couldn’t rise without them.
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Fred Voss autobiography 38 years ago Fred Voss walked into a steel mill and put on a hardhat and picked up a torch and a wrench and then a pen to write of souls sold in the job market, lives fed into time clocks, men owned and ordered like they were hardly men at all, by bosses and owners too good to shoulder a load or grab a pickaxe, as the earth is covered with concrete and the trees and tigers die. Fred Voss looks for the day when all this will be changed when women and men with dirt on their hands and gold in their souls will no longer be treated like children but given the power and respect the true makers of this world deserve.
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I want to change the world, I want to strike the spark or kick the pebble that will start the fire or the avalanche that will change the world a little. - Fred Voss In the United States, the richest country in the world, real wages have stagnated or declined for decades and huge inequalities between rich and poor have developed. Meanwhile the top 1% of the U.S. population own 35% of the wealth, and trade unions, employment rights and the social safety net are attacked. The outrageous consequence of this divisive class war by rich elites is that mortality rates amongst white working class Americans are getting worse. Men and women are dying early, from obesity, drugs, drink and violence, including suicide. How far behind are working people in the U.K. and in other societies afflicted by neoliberal capitalism? Everyone can see the growing inequality, the precarious and low paid nature of employment, the housing crisis in our cities, the divisions and inequalities between social classes, the problems of obesity, drink and drugs, and the sheer everyday struggle to pay the bills for many working people. In this situation, Fred Voss is like a prophet. He is warning us of the consequences of the way we live, he is telling truth to power, and he is inspiring us with a positive vision of a possible – and desirable – socialist future. - Len McCluskey, General Secretary, Unite the Union
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