FRED VOSS

Shortchanged

People are told

all their lives what is good for them who to vote for

where to go and what to do as they march

to work and up and down the streets buying things and yet

Dostoevsky

in 4 great huge novels barely scratches the surface

of what it is to be a human being.

People are told what to think

and what it all means and what

to give their lives for by politicians

and bosses and bureaucrats and experts and

teachers and traffic signals and laws

and electric shocks and 30 days in County Jail and armies

that kill millions of people and yet

Shakespeare

barely shines a few rays of light

into the mystery of the human soul.

People use up their lives

thinking they are worth nothing as they follow other people's directions

while the genius of Tennessee Williams

in dozens of plays moves our understanding

of what is really inside us

one fraction of an inch forward.

Winning

No reason

to get up each morning looking and hoping for love

that you will never find no reason

to spend your life wrenching words out of your heart

writing novel after novel after novel that will never get published,

no reason

to leave your heart wide open to a child or parent or lover

who will never love you or to

enter that race and run it over and over when

you will never win or to stare up at the stars night after night

wondering

why we are here when

you will never get an answer no reason

to keep trying to say something in a poem

or painting or song that

can never be said,

except

for that thing inside of us that must never stop trying.

Why I Will Never Stop Writing

These words I write my poems with

have picked up the broken lives of thousands of men

on concrete factory floors

and my own broken life on those concrete floors

in their hands and lifted them up to some kind of light

and transformed them.

They have given me

a way to go,

the only

way I could ever have gone and the only way

I will ever be able to go, the way

I was born for and had to bleed and vomit and weep and

moan and go crazy and want to die for because I didn't

have it,

away

that can never fail me and that is really worth so much more

than fame or money

or immortality.

Suicide

Every time

a homeless man walking a sidewalk crazy with the pain inside him is passed

by us

driving our good cars with our good jobs something dies

inside of us every time

we leave a homeless man crumpled against some wall

on asphalt where he must try to sleep in the cold and go home

to climb into our warm beds something dies

inside of us every time

on some street corner because he has failed to gather enough change

to eat again some man's

head falls as the last drop of hope drains out of him

at age 40 something dies

inside of us as

all our cold cash in those bank vaults

thrives.

Shrunken

Lives

that were once going to leap tall buildings

and save the day

and kill all the bad guys lives

that the universe once revolved around when they were 6

now

looking out of windows in lonely bare apartments

with their 13th beer of the day in their hands wondering

how they got trapped now

staring out of the high plastic windows of steel mills

after 20 years under the brutal eyes of foremen

stunned

as if they can't believe the only life they will ever live

could have ended up there,

lives

that seem to know nothing about how any of this has happened

except

that something

has gone terribly wrong.

Down But Not Out

Maybe the greatest thing about our Sunday pickup softball game

was that

no matter how lonely

or poor

or hungover or strung out or

fresh out of a mental hospital

or jail or

hated by our parents or

stuck-on-a-nowhere-job-that-was-breaking-our-spirit-and-mind

any of us were or

no matter how ugly and small and cockroach-infested of an

apartment

we lived in or

how many times we may have tried to kill ourselves,

any one of us might still

step up to the plate

and hit a home run.

Anyone

who can hit a home run

still has a chance

to turn their life around.

Mysteries

Bikers

with soft spots in their hearts

who would give the shirts off their backs to helpless bums and respectable

computer geniuses in big houses with 3 cars who

could walk by a man starving to death in an alley and feel

nothing and fragile

little ladies who have broken the spirits of their sons

for life and

a man who has never hurt anyone in his life

suddenly murdering 8 co-workers with a gun and

politicians in immaculate suits murdering thousands

and thousands with waves of their pens and

a murderous gang member

become a poet

or painter and machinists

who have always acted like they would step all over

anything throwing bread crumbs

to birds so they can take them to their chicks

born up on machine shop roofbeams people

are never as simple as you think

they are.

Broken

Laid off,

in a little trailer by a guard gate the machinists

are stripped

of tools out of their toolboxes

and photo i.d. badges

and company shirts,

stripped

of incomes,

stripped

of usefulness at 45 or 51 or 55

stripped

and sent out the gate like little boys,

little boys

with families

and mortgages

and lifetimes of pride

on the line

who must now beg

other companies for the right

to be adults.

Dealing With It

Put them away behind a wall put away

the people down on their luck the man

who begins tearing himself apart whenever he cannot get a drink the man

who murdered someone in a rage 11 years ago the men

in those alleys and out on those street corners the man

from out of state who cannot find a job the woman

whose husband beat and robbed her for 8 years

and then disappeared the teenagers

who have not found a reason for anything

but rage and violence the man