Work Early

First job where he paid Social Security?

   Bellhop at a high end hotel

   where absolutely illegally

he brought liquor to rooms. The job paid well,

   85 cents an hour plus tips

      and purloined liquor sips.

The worst of it was lining up the whores,

slipping them with his pass key through the doors

to where fat businessmen lay passed out cold.

I think that he was just sixteen years old.

His awful jobs were sweated out on farms,

   moving irrigation pipe

      which he could scarcely lift,

(his lower back was not his greatest gift)

torching, scraping and painting weathered barns,

falling into a dark potato pit

      where the odor was so ripe,

      worse than the vilest shit,

      he swore ungodly oaths

and reckoned it was time to burn his clothes.

His best job? Working up at Boy Scout camp,

the cracker barrels by a Coleman lamp,

the song fests by the campfires in the trees,

contrition in the chapel on his knees,

passing on all he’d learned there as a boy

to younger scouts, and every dawn a joy.

   Back got so bad he had to learn

   to toil entirely with his brain,

firm in his long conviction—he could turn

adversity to hard-earned teenage gain.

Tim Murphy