So this is it. It's time to settle in.
Get used to these three gray cubicle walls,
the tasteless coffee, the recycling bin
Beside the coke machine; the bathroom stalls
that never close just right. In twenty years
you won't even notice the keyboard grit.
By the time the burnt popcorn odor clears
in the break room, you'll be done with this shit.
I know: blear-eyed hours with a flickering screen
were not part of The Plan. Still, who's to say
it could have turned out better? Chase some fool dream,
chance is, you'll fail. At least this place is clean.
Benefits. Two weeks off. 401K.
Put in the time.
Stay Safe.
Try not to scream.
3 comments:
Good one. Reminds me of Roethke's poem, Dolor. Similar iteration of the somehow numbing details. For me, in those office situations (and most of mine have been academic) it is the supposedly humorous cartoons on the bulletin board. Something about them fills me with horror.
Excellent evocation of the slow despair, and a great close. So many lazy poets would have rhymed screen with dream, but you chose something tougher and made it pay off.
Poem raises a deeper question. Isn't just an evocation, though it is good at that. What is it about these places? Nothing wrong with benefits, savings. Why is it that we are, in our culture, forced to choose between such good things and a sense of full life? Are they intrinsically opposed? I cannot believe that. We are seeing something wrong, I think.
Oh--I also think of a poem by W. D. Snodgrass, in his book, After Experience. The poem is Examination, in which a bunch of creeps one cannot help reading as dry academics cut the pinions off of the fierce bird-god Garuda, turning him into one of them.
You're right, Jack, as always. :) Here's the Roethke poem, to which I hope mine is a nice companion:
Dolor
I have known the inexorable sadness of pencils,
Neat in their boxes, dolor of pad and paper-weight,
All the misery of manila folders and mucilage,
Desolation in immaculate public places,
Lonely reception room, lavatory, switchboard,
The unalterable pathos of basin and pitcher,
Ritual of multigraph, paper-clip, comma,
Endless duplication of lives and objects.
And I have seen dust from the walls of institutions,
Finer than flour, alive, more dangerous than silica,
Sift, almost invisible, through long afternoons of tedium,
Dropping a fine film on nails and delicate eyebrows,
Glazing the pale hair, the duplicate grey standard faces.
-- Theodore Roethke
Post a Comment