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      May 5, 2017The Lucky OneGreg Kosmicki

      In 3 days I’ll be 64 years old
      and I still haven’t figured out
      how to write a slam poem.
      I also don’t know if I’ll be
      able to go to work for 6 more years
      or so, but I’ve got an easy job,
      so I think I’ll make it.
      It’s weird to be at that point
      in your life where you know
      as a reality the inevitable
      reality you used to scoff at
      more or less, as a young man.
      It’s also weird how you think
      when you are drunk
      that you are much handsomer
      and glib than you actually are,
      but the good thing about that is
      whenever everyone else is loaded
      they don’t know the difference.
      It’s weird how a lot of things
      in life are like that.
      Sometime along the way when you
      get off the bus and walk
      around the gum and potholes
      to a job every day, you notice
      that whatever you do is only
      as worthwhile as the rest of your
      society’s willingness to accept
      that what you are doing
      makes any sense whatsoever.
      There really is no reason
      for much of anything humans do
      once you get past hunting and fishing,
      farming and shelter building.
      Oh, sure, art makes sense too
      if you look at the cave drawings.
      Everything else is an agreed-upon
      arrangement we promise
      not to make fun of each other for—
      sitting at desks making up stuff—
      then we exchange pieces of paper
      we agreed upon has value,
      sometimes we laugh,
      sometimes we cry, depending.
      Nowdays everybody wants me to
      buy a lot of gold but I would rather
      have some dirt and a few seeds,
      which you can’t have anymore
      because they’re patented,
      and people want us to use up all our water
      so we can get more oil to power
      our cars so we can get
      to the pumps to buy more oil.
      If you think about this stuff too long
      it will make you crazy,
      and of course if you don’t
      you’re going to go crazy anyway
      if you live long enough
      which is where I’m getting
      closer and closer to, and almost
      every day at my job I see
      the lucky ones who made it
      to the Manors and the Gardens
      and the Vistas, which is why I still
      like to stay up late
      at night, especially nights
      like this when it rains,
      when the earth has forgotten,
      and I can hear the thunder crack.

      from #55 - Spring 2017

      Greg Kosmicki

      “I worked for the State of Nebraska for almost 25 years as a social services worker, a Medicaid and food stamps worker and supervisor, and for the last twelve years as an adult protective services worker. Before that, I worked two years for a private agency providing case management services for homeless mentally ill persons. Prior to that my wife and I lived four years in a privately-operated group home for developmentally delayed persons, which we managed. Though these sorts of work are quite literally gold mines of human interactions for a writer to use, rarely have I written directly about my face-to-face experiences with the people I served because it did not feel ethically right to do so. Rather, I wrote often of the frustration of the need to work when all I wanted to do was to sit around, be a spoiled poet, and write. I retired in June of 2016 when a golden turd I wrote about in a poem in 1981 fell out of the sky, fulfilling all my magical thinking about poetry, which all who know me well know I have always worshipped as my primary god.”

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