3 Poems
by Richard L. Gegick
I wrote all these poems this year. It’s been hard to write. To be honest, I haven’t done much reading. But I think we’re all in that boat. Kill Your Bosses is a typical service industry day off. You’re always waiting for a phone call or a text until dinner service starts. Closing Manager is the straight up restaurant manager blues. There have been far too many nights I’ve sat alone in a restaurant; tie undone, waiting for the last guests to leave or the dishwashers to finish. A closed restaurant at the end of the night is wild. You feel the energy buzzing off the walls. You still smell the broilers. You want to leave, but you can’t. Your co-workers have been at the bar for two hours. What do you do? If you’re in charge of the inventory, you know what liquor you were up on. So you pour some off. You’re lucky if you’re up on the good stuff. Taco Night is what I approximate bliss and happiness look like. It’s damn near impossible to know bliss and happiness in the moment. I have to tease it out later, and only then I realize it.
Kill Your Bosses
The calls start the minute I’ve laid in bed
a minute too long. Texts too.
Can you come in to work tonight? We just booked
a 30 top. We’re short staffed. We’ll make it
up to you. You can take another day off.
Not Saturday. Never ever Saturday.
Not this Sunday, either.
There’s a home Steelers game and we could
get really busy. We need you.
There’s a pile of laundry, some cleaning
I need to do. Run the vacuum, scrub the toilet.
All these tasks are tasks that wait
for days off because they’re easier to do
with a glass of wine,
not to mention the other work,
the work done in silence like learning how
to give love and accept it
how to live an adult life with adult relationships
outside of after work bars
where server gossip burns cigarette holes
into our winter coats.
If you want to know, I don’t feel a day over 23.
It’s hard to feel myself getting older
when I measure my life in ticket times.
Closing Manager
I’m paid by the hour but I don’t want the extra time.
The restaurant emptied out and now
it’s just me and the dishwashers.
We both thought we were done until
the lazy bus boys brought back
all the bar dishes. Now another hour, at least.
My tasks are complete. I counted the bank,
calculated the deposit at ten-cents short.
Nothing to worry about. Typed up the shift recap:
Busy but smooth night. Only two refires.
Shawn and Katie sold a rewards card.
Private parties left happy.
The dining room music still plays
and in this empty restaurant I feel like
the last person awake at a house party
spinning records as the sun comes up,
reaching into the cold water of a cooler
for those last beers while everyone sleeps.
All this waiting, this time killing
from unexpected delays, no wonder every manager
I’ve ever worked for pours heavy from
the inventory as I do now, tip-toeing behind
the sight-line of a security camera
to gin up the courage to call yet another lover
and tell her to go on to bed,
I’m going to be much later than I thought.
Taco Night
In the park we take off our shoes
even though it’s not warm enough.
The sun shines so it looks warmer
than it feels today.
We split a bottle of wine.
It’s one of those days where we talk
about all those things we loved,
the small loves, the ones we forget about
day to day unless there’s time
to really think, and there’s plenty of that now.
Like how Pizza Hut served root beer
in plastic pitchers with crushed ice,
how the ice made the pop taste better.
And how when I’d go,
I’d see my classmate Joy in a booth
doing her homework under a Tiffany lamp,
while her mother waited tables.
And how we can see the Cathedral of Learning
stretch its neck above the trees from
any East End neighborhood,
but Oakland sucks now and there’s no reason
to go. No Panther Hollow Inn,
no mounds of fries from the Original,
no sweaty punk shows at the Upstage.
Yes, cigarettes tasted best in the early winter,
right before Christmas, on class break
leaning against the dirty stone
of that grand classroom building.
It’s not winter, now. It’s Good Friday
before an early Easter. We’re not great
Catholics, and neither of us still smoke.
After we kill the bottle, we run out of
things to say, but that’s OK. There isn’t
a lot of sun left to burn.
We just tie our shoes and walk home
for our dinner. It’s taco night.
by Richard L. Gegick
 |
| Restaurant waiter takes a cigarette break at Old Town Prepoštská street (Bratislava, Slovakia) / photo by Jules Verne Times Two |
I wrote all these poems this year. It’s been hard to write. To be honest, I haven’t done much reading. But I think we’re all in that boat. Kill Your Bosses is a typical service industry day off. You’re always waiting for a phone call or a text until dinner service starts. Closing Manager is the straight up restaurant manager blues. There have been far too many nights I’ve sat alone in a restaurant; tie undone, waiting for the last guests to leave or the dishwashers to finish. A closed restaurant at the end of the night is wild. You feel the energy buzzing off the walls. You still smell the broilers. You want to leave, but you can’t. Your co-workers have been at the bar for two hours. What do you do? If you’re in charge of the inventory, you know what liquor you were up on. So you pour some off. You’re lucky if you’re up on the good stuff. Taco Night is what I approximate bliss and happiness look like. It’s damn near impossible to know bliss and happiness in the moment. I have to tease it out later, and only then I realize it.
- Richard L. Gegick
Kill Your Bosses
The calls start the minute I’ve laid in bed
a minute too long. Texts too.
Can you come in to work tonight? We just booked
a 30 top. We’re short staffed. We’ll make it
up to you. You can take another day off.
Not Saturday. Never ever Saturday.
Not this Sunday, either.
There’s a home Steelers game and we could
get really busy. We need you.
There’s a pile of laundry, some cleaning
I need to do. Run the vacuum, scrub the toilet.
All these tasks are tasks that wait
for days off because they’re easier to do
with a glass of wine,
not to mention the other work,
the work done in silence like learning how
to give love and accept it
how to live an adult life with adult relationships
outside of after work bars
where server gossip burns cigarette holes
into our winter coats.
If you want to know, I don’t feel a day over 23.
It’s hard to feel myself getting older
when I measure my life in ticket times.
Closing Manager
I’m paid by the hour but I don’t want the extra time.
The restaurant emptied out and now
it’s just me and the dishwashers.
We both thought we were done until
the lazy bus boys brought back
all the bar dishes. Now another hour, at least.
My tasks are complete. I counted the bank,
calculated the deposit at ten-cents short.
Nothing to worry about. Typed up the shift recap:
Busy but smooth night. Only two refires.
Shawn and Katie sold a rewards card.
Private parties left happy.
The dining room music still plays
and in this empty restaurant I feel like
the last person awake at a house party
spinning records as the sun comes up,
reaching into the cold water of a cooler
for those last beers while everyone sleeps.
All this waiting, this time killing
from unexpected delays, no wonder every manager
I’ve ever worked for pours heavy from
the inventory as I do now, tip-toeing behind
the sight-line of a security camera
to gin up the courage to call yet another lover
and tell her to go on to bed,
I’m going to be much later than I thought.
Taco Night
In the park we take off our shoes
even though it’s not warm enough.
The sun shines so it looks warmer
than it feels today.
We split a bottle of wine.
It’s one of those days where we talk
about all those things we loved,
the small loves, the ones we forget about
day to day unless there’s time
to really think, and there’s plenty of that now.
Like how Pizza Hut served root beer
in plastic pitchers with crushed ice,
how the ice made the pop taste better.
And how when I’d go,
I’d see my classmate Joy in a booth
doing her homework under a Tiffany lamp,
while her mother waited tables.
And how we can see the Cathedral of Learning
stretch its neck above the trees from
any East End neighborhood,
but Oakland sucks now and there’s no reason
to go. No Panther Hollow Inn,
no mounds of fries from the Original,
no sweaty punk shows at the Upstage.
Yes, cigarettes tasted best in the early winter,
right before Christmas, on class break
leaning against the dirty stone
of that grand classroom building.
It’s not winter, now. It’s Good Friday
before an early Easter. We’re not great
Catholics, and neither of us still smoke.
After we kill the bottle, we run out of
things to say, but that’s OK. There isn’t
a lot of sun left to burn.
We just tie our shoes and walk home
for our dinner. It’s taco night.
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