It couldn’t be helped, It was something that I had to do, Or I’d have been in bad shape For weeks to come
I sat and listened to that Goddamned hold message For an hour and five minutes
They repeated it Every twenty seconds; I counted
“We’re sorry, but all of our agents “Are busy assisting other customers. “Please hold and we’ll be with you “As soon as possible. “There are currently more than “Three callers ahead of you.”
I put my phone On the ‘speaker’ setting, And laid it on my belly
I was smart and plugged it Into the charger, Figured I would Kill a few birds with one piece Of terminal boredom
I added another layer of Multitasking to my Very minor ordeal
I read Bukowski’s Love is a Dog from Hell While I waited
Forty minutes in…
It was frequently difficult To concentrate, with that Stupid message, every Twenty seconds—“We’re just a “Tiny bit sorry… “All of our agents are “Pretending to be busy, so we “Can feel like we’re important, “And squeeze a few more bucks out, “By not paying any more staff than “We absolutely have to. “There are three callers ahead of you.”
But the breaks in my focus, They gave me an excuse to jump back Several lines and reread what I Had just read, to make sure that I Hadn’t missed anything
The boredom, The stupid interruptions, The longing for a life that is not A prisoner of circumstance, A slave to bureaucracies, To be able to do something else… Any fucking thing that is something Other than this stupid shit…
“We’re sorry, but all of our agents “Are playing solitaire and circle jerk. “Please hold onto your sanity… “Or don’t; we could all use a good laugh. “There are currently “Two callers ahead of you… “We think. We could be wrong. [Shrugs.] “Who the fuck knows, really? “We’re not fucking philosophers.”
It went well with the poetry, It matched Chuck’s experience Of life
Always waiting Waiting on life to just Come off it, already
Forty-five minutes
“We’re sorry, but all of our agents “Are placing bets on horses, “Arguing with whores, “Getting drunk and feeling lonely, “Feeling happy, angry, nothing at all. “Anything but assisting customers. “Please hold and we’ll be “Finished shitting as soon as possible. “There is one caller ahead of you.”
Maybe that last part was Charles Talking to me,
I forget
I do know that he said (And I’m paraphrasing here, Paraphrasing wildly… speculatively, Because ol’ drunk Chuck said That’s the only way to do anything)
He said that we’re all sitting here, Knowing, knowing that life, The real life, is available, out there, If only the small-minded Would get out of the way, And let the rest of us have it
We’re not entitled to it, We realize that; No one is entitled to Anything
But the rich, the powerful, And the boorish, dreary, Unimaginative oafs, They seem to have All the access To all the best stuff
But they’re too greedy, Too fearful, too lacking in vision To step aside and let someone else Have a crack at the good stuff; They feel they never have enough, Or that only they can Handle it all properly
A Collage of Chimeras and Phantasms, the 12th publication by Kevin Trent Boswell
A Collage of Chimeras and Phantasms is a general collection of poems. The material veers wildly in several directions at once. You’ll find stream-of-consciousness pieces, romantic poems, works of heartbreak, dark scalpel slices that reside in the penumbra of horror, and avant-garde bits of absurdism. So, there’s no need to trouble yourself attempting to understand the methodology here—there is none.
Kevin Trent Boswell 