Editor’s Note: We’re proud to be featuring Michael Lind’s work at Liberty Island. This is the third of eight poems.
My plan is just to work another year.
I want to have a business of my own.
Better to be the boss, than bitch and moan.
A job like this, it isn’t a career.
I’d rather be a waitress than cashier.
Standing all day, I ache down to the bone.
My plan is just to work another year
to save enough so I can get a loan.
Some of these people, they’ve been working here
forever, you can hear it in their tone,
defeated and depressed and all alone.
I know I’ve got to get my ass in gear.
My plan is just to work another year.
***
Photo by saraj (Pixabay)
Michael Lind is the author of more than a dozen books of nonfiction, fiction and poetry, including The New Class War and Land of Promise: An Economic History of the United States. His narrative poem The Alamo was named one of the best books of the year in 1997 by the Los Angeles Times Book Review and Bluebonnet Girl, his children’s book in verse illustrated by Kate Kiesler, won an Oppenheim Toy Portfolio prize. He has been an editor or staff writer at The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, The New Republic and The National Interest and is a columnist for Tablet and Project Syndicate and a fellow at New America, a nonpartisan think tank he co-founded in 1999. A fifth generation native of Austin, Texas, Lind has taught at Harvard and Johns Hopkins and is a professor at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin.
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