Work History

Work History

My first job, I lucked into it, was

building four letter radio station
call signs from tangled bins

of consonants and vowels. 

In those days it was all

done by hand,

the sharp corner on the F kept you

on your toes, O’s easy to bobble when you got

careless, “slot four, out the door!”,

newbie mnemonic forever

lodged in my brain. 

I bided time on the K

line until a spot opened

on the W, the graveyard shift, it paid

a little more, the hours going

toward my Creative License.

It was the seventies. We chewed betel

to stay awake during long

classical station runs then punched

out woozy,

blind in the morning sun, fingers clawed

and knicked, teeth stained red. 

Top Forty, we popped ‘em

out like biscuits and squirrelled

away X’s to slip

onto the ends of freeform formats, 

small acts of defiance. 

I quit to avoid

prosecution, nabbed at last sneaking

parts out in my pants, one

call letter at a

time, building words, paragraphs, whole

stories in my basement.