Growing Pains

Written While working as a temp receptionist at a temp agency 2004

You ask me or maybe you don't

What have you learned this last month?

Are you better organized,

Have you got the processes memorized?

NO! What I have learned in this short time is that life truly isn't fair.

You think you look at the worlds with wide-open eyes

Until the door is blasted open with a rush of cold air.

While outside the homeless and convicts voices howl to come in

By the mission they are sent, they drop by or are referred by a

Friend.

Hoping for a job their broken lives they will mend

The great unwashed humanity streams through the door.

Not many jobs here.

Still they come in hoards.

At first you think

I can turn THESE PEOPLE away

They stink, they act funny or on a job they may not stay

The employers can't trust him

(he just got out of prison)

It just can't be done

(not realizing your sentencing them to more time)

It's so nice to have a job a  you walk around in nice Italian shoes

A glossy magazine under your arm or the daily dose of news

An espresso on the desk that would buy one of them a meal

You never realized before how lucky you've been

How special how privileged

Never forsaken

You look at their desperate, ashamed of defiant faces.

As you gently send them on their way

You try using kind words and see their 

Hearts break

We don't have the right look, not even a car

We haven't enough to eat, without work we'll never go far

Come back in six months

You say in a lie

Maybe you'll have changed and so might the sky..