PAD Day 9: Countdown to Retirement

I don't think I mentioned that I volunteered to help Robert Brewer with the editorial process in this month's Poetic Asides challenge. Last year he had the herculean task of slogging through over 20,000 poetry entries and narrowing them down to 10 a day (300 total) that were worthy of consideration by the guest judges.  This year he wisely recruited fellow poets to help him with all of this, and I will have the distinct privilege of wading through up to 1000 or so entries for a single day later this month. (I won't say which day - that should be a secret.)  Then I will send him the 30 to 50 poems I consider worthy of his consideration, which he will winnow down to 10 finalists to send to that day's guest judge. The ultimate winner, of course, gets to be in the next edition of Poem Your Heart Out, the anthology/craft book he'll publish via Words Dance Press.  So wish me luck separating the wheat from the chaff!

Today's prompts from Poetic Asides and NaPoWriMo:
(1) Write a "work" poem, and
(2) Write a "visual" poem. Maureen suggests writing a "calligram", a poem that actually takes the shape or image of something. Since posting a poem like that requires a working knowledge of HTML (not my strong suit), I decided to go a different route and write a "Fibonacci" poem - a poem whose syllable count on each line reflects the Fibonacci number sequence, where each number is the sum of the two previous numbers, i.e., 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, etc. The increasingly lengthening lines have a distinct pattern, and a "double Fibonacci" (where the lines decrease again in the same sequence) lends itself well to certain themes and content. So here is my "work Fibonacci". (Actually, I do end it with a "visual" of sorts.)

Retirement Fib

I
can
not wait –
after all
these years of drudging,
my grindstone-rubbed nub of a nose,
after decades of toting barges and lifting bales,
the paperwork alps, surly bosses, water-cooler snarks, meetings and past-due deadlines,
it’s finally time to wind down the clock of career,
put away the pens, pack up the books,
doff the business suit
and slap on
a great
big