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gary beck : songs of a clerk
The people in my office laugh and chatter all day long. They are not typewriters, adding machines, duplicators. Just bodies, salesmen, clerks, secretaries, intent on business, while I puissant navigator founder on an iceberg.
Risk
The grey song of the morning subway, stand impaled upon thy neighbors horns, the implacable charge to work, then the ambush is sprung on defenseless dreamers, an endangered species.
Temp
Temporary gypsy alone in unknown office, they talk distant people past me. Armed with sharpened pencils and dreary figures, I sit a mindless computer, leering at five oclock.
Greeley Square IV
The dreariest of clerks goes to lunch in a twenty dollar suit, then sits in the sun in Greeley Square. The shabby people line the benches victims of the city pigeons. Weary and depressed, he tries in vain to lose his office, but fellow-workers find his refuge and smash the hope of escape. Finally they leave. Ten minutes left to dream. An elegant woman slowly passes, vacations in her handbag. He stares foreign lands and jewels at her. She doesnt see him. More than defeated, he returns to work.
The Office
Sameness of day in my clerks crypt, windowless . Stale . Grey . The door opens . More work. Closes . Less Joy
Gary Beck has spent most of his adult life as a theater director & worked as an art dealer when he couldnt earn a living in the theater. He has also been a tennis pro, a ditch digger & a salvage diver. His poetry has been published in dozens of literary journals. His chapbook, 'The Conquest of Somalia', will be published by Cervena Barva Press. His original plays & translations of Moliere, Aristophanes & Sophocles have been produced Off Broadway & toured colleges & outdoor performance venues. He currently lives in New York City, where hes busy writing fiction & his short stories have recently appeared in numerous literary magazines.
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{ issue four |
