Hours and Hours.

I work.  For hours and hours and hours, I work,

trying to please, trying to bend knees.  For years I have

worked at the same place-a chinese restaurant-shelling fortune

cookies and feeding them to pelicans.

This is not hard labor.  Hard labor is different it is something else,

something you cannot see, cannot feel, cannot be.

Every day, after work, I eat one orange, my grandfather loved oranges

and peeled them for his wife until they both died-collapsed on

the kitchen floor at ninety-one.  

I do not break down.  I do not move like an unmovable wall.  You stand

there like a wall.  You are my boss.  I am not sitting.  I am not tall.

I am not reflection.  This is not my house. 

Sometimes I wish for a quick death and that is all I can take,

talk, talk about now.  The wind moves my hair.