OK, one poem about the horrors and then I'll lighten it up.
This is called "The Butcher, Borges, What a Shock."
It's after Pascal's Sphere by Jorge Luis Borges.
"What a jewel the view is from the furnished room.
Flashing with red, green, and orange traffic
lights, that's dancing and it sings as a general sound.
What a crystal air is, metrical in structure,
clear in the open work, burning at its joints,
and moving in its bodies ordered everywhere
as forces, products in pure chance.
What an honor to be in it even as a floor.
But I had to look away and down the open trap
door in the center of the room into the cellar hole
where I have not yet fallen.
A man-faced, bat-winged worm looked up from his work
on my love's corpse falling, his grin foul with his lights
and said, so what?
Faller, I come in the works of your love's wounds foaming.
My sperm are his worms.
Love, I have known you and your change from spring to garbage.
So I ask you, why is the world so beautiful?
It has to be all sex that make us want it here.
Against the worm's brief, I am the root and teeth.
What you dream I am.
You are the meat, fly if you can.
So beget sons against death, get real estates against decay,
and praise physical glory.
The stars above the roof are there
as God's dust at the center of this sphere whose
edge is nowhere."
That as I said is from Pascal's Sphere by Jorge Luis Borges.
So now I'll get back to the working life.
Somebody asked me to recite a poem about working.
And reciting working poems during a time of recession
is a bit obscene.
But I just say to people who are out of work
that working is lousy too.