Spanish Moss

I should have been a pair of ragged claws
instead of this workhorse, workman, working stiff.
Working nights now, asleep through the day, waddling off to work when everyone else is waddling home, or drinking beer, when everyone else is asleep.
My steel toe caps pad the floors of labyrinthine department stores, behind the scenes, back where no customer can see, under and above, creeping like a rat, with the rats. Hours of dust and guardless grinders, face powdered ghost-white, sitting on the midnight pavement, eating lunch from a greasy pot with Chinese painters squatting all around and Scottish carpenters discussing the price of Iron Bru. And me no longer smoking so, tense and intense, I keep my eyes flashing bloody murder in my goggles, my ears in muffs against the whine and mimi-mimi nonsense of the radio, my nose and mouth porotected, filtered, bearded in sweat.
Cavelike and cavernous the building. 6th floor: Toys. Rows and rows of gender specific colour coordination, pink unicorns and pastel Barbies, grey, black, red warriors Action! Robot! Doom! Collision! Smash!
I left dusty footprints on the 6th, and opened the secret door and scratched a teddy bear under his chin. 5th floor lingerie: I would have stopped to perv the models and scratch a couple of chins, but the cameras are everywhere. 3rd floor 4th floor building site.
“Keep this door closed. The customers don’t need to see our mess!”
The customers don’t need to see that behind the scenes glamour is shamefully held together with masking tape, and all along the walls and secret passageways there are mocking signs, partial paw prints in the mud, bones in paper bags, magpies crying: ‘The customer is always wrong! The customer must never see the mess they’re in, the dirt and rats and dusty working stiffs!’
…
I have no time to write pretty things dressed in friendly structures. I’ve slept through most of my weekend, and have no stories to tell which can’t be compressed, flattened and discarded. Most of what I have can fit in two dimensions on a city wall, over a corporate sponsored piece of graffiti, McDonalds packets, cups and wrappers whirling in the wind: THE CUSTOMERS DO NEED TO SEE THIS MESS! IT IS OUR MESS! IT IS THEIRS!
The beach on Saturdays and Sundays is enough to make me want to cry; McDonalds, KFC, Pizza Hut packaging sown roughly in the sand, bodies brought up by the tide, the water boiling red, immigrant wars, water shortages, uprisings, downturns, revolutions, starvation, corporate sponsored fucking graffiti, Nike shoes a meter high, ‘In Yo Hood’. The death of the planet, rib cages like bleached roots in the sand, flesh like Spanish moss:
The customers don’t need to see our mess.
…
What words of hope and solace to finish this one off?
None. Let it hang until it is limp, then gently let it fall, face first into a hole, and sleep.
…
No. That’s not right:
Be kind. Be gentle.
Be fierce and tough and as angry as you like.
Don’t take no shit, but give none either.
And clean up after yourself
In such a way that
Others will see you and say:
“Wow that person looks like they’ve got their shit together,
Maybe I’d like to be like that some day.”
Smile, enjoy life and keep your eyes open
And don’t ignore the mess!