Sprinting headlong into month #7 without work (yyyyyeah, the economy is definitely on the "up", GW), I recollected a short poem that I'd written years ago right after quitting a horrible, awful job testing video games. It's not a glamorous as you'd like to think. It's kind of like being a crash-test dummy, but instead of being in the lovely open air before your head splinters a windshield, you're locked in a dark office filled with nerds.

This is something I actually saw, and it cracked my shit up. Therefore, I present it to you, in hopes that your shit develops cracks in it.

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VW engine purring
at the corner of Wilshire
and San Vicente.
A cool October passage of
Pacific shoreline winds
whipping across the windscreen
while hurry hurry hurry
buzzes all around.

I’d just quit my third job
in one month.

A well-dressed homeless man
marches up the median
as I sit at the red,
his charcoal hands gingerly gripping the
“25 cents, please help” sign
in his fists.

Three cars down the procession,
he stops.
It was the look of a five year old
who’d just smacked his first base hit:

Frozen,
confused,
dazed.

Suddenly, a voice from behind him shouts:

“You gotta go to ALL the cars, man!”

Plopped on the park bench behind him,
the slumping form of another homeless man.
The usual outfit,
the predictable stench.
And there he sits, shaking his bald head, saying:

“Amateurs.”

Fuck.
even the homeless have got bosses
bitching at ‘em.