Work History

I lucked into my first job
building four-letter radio station
call signs from tangled bins
of consonants and vowels.  

In those days it was
all done by hand.

Sharp corners on the F’s kept you
on your toes, O’s easy to bobble
when you got careless, “slot four,
out the door!”, a newbie mnemonic

forever lodged in my brain.  
I bided my 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 morning sun,
fingers bleeding, 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 sneaking parts out
in my pants, one letter at a time,

building words, paragraphs, whole
stories in my basement.