Poetry: Selections from John Grochalski

such strange luck

again

we talk about brendan

 

brendan has consumed this place

since he was hired six weeks ago

 

brendan hasn’t learned the job

brendan won’t do the jobs he’s been taught

brendan falls asleep in the office

 

brendan doesn’t take lunch or his breaks

at the required time

 

brendan creeps up behind us

while we’re having conversations

about how weird he is

 

sometime brendan just sits there

and stares at the wall

 

he doesn’t flush his bowel movements too

 

what we talk about

when we talk about brendan

is fear and incompetence

 

and he lives in all of our heads rent free

 

there is so much brendan

that i have to have a conversation with my boss

about all of the brendan we’re drowning in

 

my boss says brendan is on probation

my boss says brendan needs to shape up or ship out

 

my boss says that if he were a new employee

that he’d be doing his job…and then some

 

he says, brendan is lucky to have this job

 

i think about brendan

while my boss talks about work responsibility

 

and i think about me

rising before the sun

shitting, showering, shaving

sucking down coffee as i race to put on clothes

to join the other depressives on our commute to work

 

i think about the eight hours a day

this job takes from me

 

all that time and energy

decades of it now…just sucked away

 

i think about the forty hours a week

and the fragile exchange of my life for money in a paycheck

 

i think about brendan

and me

and luck

 

and if this is luck

then it is such strange luck

 

if this is luck…

 

sometimes i’d rather have no luck at all

the howling

a crazed man is howling

is the restroom

behind my office

the sound is guttural

like the dogs barking

outside my window

the man is howling

screaming

smacking his head off the wall

and the thump

thump

thump

is so rhythmic

i subconsciously beat along to it

thump

thump

thumping

my palms on my desk

the tribal noises

of mediocre white men

in full capitalist emotional breakdown

then comes the howling again

a lonely wolf leaning over a ravine

and i don’t know what brought him here

brought us together

he in his prison

and i in mine

our sickness covering both ends of the spectrum

but i know how this will end

with the cops

like it always does

cops making their cop faces

making their cop sounds

beating their authoritarian chests

as they drag the man out into the street

to join the car horns

and detritus of urban decay

and it will be quiet again

inside this prison

and i will go home

to the old couch

to the stale vodka in the fridge

to the few graspable hours remaining in the day

i will tap my toes to nothing

and the dogs

will bark again

tomorrow too.

96-degree afternoon in august

the teenage girls are laughing

in the back of the bus

 

hanging out with boys who say, bro

 

from this window

the street looks like scorched earth

the sidewalks smell like death

 

and i am covered in sweat

 

like someone threw

a bucket of hot water on me

 

fifteen minutes waiting for this thing

 

96-degree afternoon in august

 

after eight-hours playing public servant

to bastards with nothing but time on their hands

 

i feel like scorched earth too

probably smell like death

 

and the teenage girls keep laughing

 

squeaking their tight asses

across dirty blue seats

 

as their boyfriends slap five

and say: bro, bro, bro

 

i spy an old man

limping quickly toward the bus stop

 

he looks ready to fall over from the heat

 

and the bus just passes him by

instead of stopping a few feet early

 

the bus driver actually beeps at him in warning

when he lurches for the street

 

humanity never ceases

to beat each other down

 

and the girls laugh at nothing funny

their tight asses squeak like unicorn farts

 

as the bros slap five

 

i look back out the window

at the old man propping himself up

against a telephone pole

 

my cell phone tells me it’ll be

another twenty minutes

before the next bus arrives

 

and the sign in front of the bus

says you get seven years in jail

 

for punching a bus driver in the face

 

and that, like everything else,

about the miserable, hot, fucking day

just doesn’t seem fair

 

doesn’t seem goddamned fair

at all.

gig-economy workers outside the starbucks

 

they want to be the one

to bring you your

caramel ribbon crunch frappuccino,

colson

 

deliver your

cookie crumble mochaccino

straight to your door on this hot summer day,

declan

 

you and kylen

just need to get up out of bed before noon

and get on that app pronto

 

seamless

paypal

grub hub

venmo

uber eats

apple pay

doordash

 

the world is your oyster

 

after a long, hard week

working from home again

 

gig-economy workers outside the starbucks

on a merciless, humid eighty-five-degree morning

with a heat index of one-hundred

 

and it looks like a moped show

 

mexican men with helmets on

trying to make a buck in the plastic hustle of america

 

frantically checking their phones

 

for java chip orders

salted caramel concoctions

mango dragonfruit lemonades

 

or whatever flavor

those wonkas in corporate will think up next

men by the dozen

standing anxiously around the door

 

waiting to dodge traffic

and run red lights

 

for pennies on the dollar

for the round-up money

 

to deliver that

vanilla sweet cream cold brew

 

to otis or emmet

or ethel or mable

 

some twenty-five-year-old

with a geriatric name

 

whose time is too important

 

if only you’d get up

and get on that app now, amelia

 

or charlotte

or dylan

or liam, oliver and elijah

 

and place that order

 

so that all those phones could ding

like a symphony

all over the block

 

and man upon man

could claw at each other

to get inside the front door

 

where your pineapple passionfruit refresher

is on the counter waiting for you, harper

 

your name in big, black letters

on the cup

 

with a big fucking smiley face

drawn on the sucker too.

freeze out on craig street

 

it was cold

january of 1994

below zero kind of cold

so cold you didn’t want

to walk anywhere

so cold i smacked right into

a telephone pole

because i had to keep my head down

from the wind

but her place was warm

and she was warm

we huddled by her radiator

drinking coffee

and looking out her window

at all of the ice and snow and cold

at angry people being blown about

she loved pop music and sitcoms

and wanted to be a veterinarian

i thought i was jack kerouac

and bob dylan mixed together

writing nonsense poems

chain smoking cigarettes

wearing wool coats

and sunglasses indoors

the two of us nothing alike

but somehow

we ended up friends on campus

and it was cold

that january of 1994

but in the previous months

she’d made mr grow warm

as we drank coffee

and the radiator clanked

the people outside

rushed by her window

like they were in pain

i told her what was in my heart

just spit it out

threw it up on her carpet

i stuttered like her radiator

having used up all of my words

she said, nothing

just moved away from me

like i was infected

and something had suddenly

gone cold between us

that miserable january afternoon

the coffee

her heart

my perception of situations

and soon i was back outside

standing at the bus stop

freezing

in the twirling

street salt and old snow

looking up at the amber light

of her living room window

having lost her

in a matter of moments

chain smoking cigarettes

as the wind blew up my ass

the first of this hard land’s

many

cold

rejections.

John Grochalski is the author of the poetry collections: The Noose Doesn’t Get Any Looser After You Punch Out (Six Gallery Press 2008), Glass City (Low Ghost Press, 2010), In the Year of Everything Dying (Camel Saloon, 2012), Starting with the Last Name Grochalski (Coleridge Street Books, 2014), The Philosopher’s Ship (Alien Buddha Press, 2018), and Eating a Cheeseburger During End Times (Kung Fu Treachery, 2021). He is also the author of the novels, The Librarian(Six Gallery Press 2013), Wine Clerk (Six Gallery Press 2016), and P-Town: Forever (Alien Buddha Press, 2021). Grochalski currently lives in Brooklyn, New York.