Hello CoastLiners

Hi Everyone. I've been keeping up a bit by reading the blog. I see that the next subject is Occupation & thought I'd post this poem I wrote a couple years ago. Excuse the format issues, I am using a MacBook in a place with only dial-up. Looking forward to seeing everyone in October.

Life's Work

............................... Life, then, is largely a thing
............................... of happens to like, not should.
................................ --Wallace Stevens

An insurance manager,
for god's sake, Stevens was,
who rose above
actuarial tables, a poet
with a profession
not professor or drinker,
a vice president
of the Hartford Accident
and Indemnity Company.

The subject of work is a noble one
if you are fence mender or
labor in factory or fields.
But what about us
vice presidents?

Don't you want to know
how we nounify the word 'spend',
verbify 'vision' and score big
on the metaphor meter:
we carry the ball and bury the competition
while picking low-hanging fruit and putting
people through their paces.
The human drama is played out here, too.
Why, Wallace, oh why
no poems that begin:

The secretaries hover about
the copy machine like bees at a hive
awaiting the nectar of the next
annual report.

I ponder this as I
gaze at a thousand sunsets gleaming
in the panes of glass across the street.

Karen