Etaoin's Ring

Nothing—in that hot room of burning metal with its globs
of greasy ink, half-drunk cups of coffee gone rancid,
buckets of cigarette butts, and loud linotype machines
of the newspaper—meant much to me at sixteen,
and everything was a lead slug in my brain, used for little
more than pulling punched Associated Press tapes, unknot
and roll them in case an editor wanted one set in type.

No inverted pyramids on the make-up dump of my workday,
no hooks in my composing stick to lure me, no story leads
that I could find buried in the hellbox.

But brass matrices fell through metal channels, liquid lead
poured into stacked molds, cooling lines of typed words
in reverse lay scattered on tables all around me.
It was as if the compositors—a cranky, unreadable bunch
of bastards to observe at a distance—lived to curse
over make-up stones, fight columns of type, headlines,
and photo engravings until they fit inside steel chases.

As a young writer, I taped a photo of Raquel Welch
to my second-hand Royal at home and called her my word whore,
my story slut, my news nymph—even though I found nothing
to write about in the mile of teletype tape I sorted everyday,
nothing in the stone-faced press men as they struggled
to put another paper to bed.

Change happens quickly and what seems improbable,
a matter of science fiction, is suddenly obsolete.
Like the short story Fredric Brown wrote back in the forties:
out of nowhere an artificially intelligent linotype machine
tries to take over the world. Only a precocious teen typesetter
thinks to feed the monster every possible Buddhist text
he could get his hands on. The moment of world crisis passes
when Linotype realizes that controlling anything is mere illusion.
The story hardly makes sense anymore.

That was the last summer anyone watched linotype men run
their fingers down the first two rows of their keyboards
and blame ETAOIN SHRDLU for their fuck-ups.
Nothing significant about that to me, nor that the word evil
shows up in the paper more than the word good.
But when heavy, gray words appear reversed in my dreams,
I imagine grabbing handfuls of cast-off lead slugs
from the hellbox and assembling them into stories
I could make into a life.