Robert Verdon, #83, The Lament of the Obsolete

… have applied for a job as a turnip shepherd1

— one who goes bowling every Friday —

showing my contempt for the job system

in a world where most worky-worky-job-shit

will soon be done by a gadget or a robot

or an invisible foreigner; no longer will there be

lion-tamers, summer inspectors, and bear-wipers

in these 21^st century woods, as nothing is more

pointless than trying to look busy when you

could be out making trouble, or at least writing

scurrilous doggerel such as this, while drawing the

dole under the suggestive names of

thirty different would-be careers … of course,

you might say, there’s always the army,

where you can put in an honest day’s

raping and pillaging and blowing up schools,

but pretty soon that’ll be automated too, nothing

like the good old days we saw on M*A*S*H,

or in ancient John Wayne and Ronald Reagan movies,

in the grand bei mir bist du shein of Full Employment

… wha-? Sorry, I fell asleep, must be my druggy

fantasies deteriorating like celluloid, better

be careful with that, or someone may put a match to it …

1Apparently an actual job title from the 1881 British census.