M. A. Schaffner
The Best Poet I Ever Knew
A friend picked for the title of his book
The Urge To Tell You Everything. The book
was never published, but the work remains.
It's the urge to tell someone who might care,
knowing full well that most would turn away
to more compelling programs, or their ads.
It's the urge to have one's memory in stone
rather than common dust, although one knows
in little time one's life would be a glyph
unintelligible or misread. In time
one has no time, nor monuments nor love
and nothing more to miss than nothing more.
The work remains, a curious artifact
of time already passed and passing time,
and telling all the nothing one can know.
Biannual Employee Engagement Survey Findings
How interminable those train delays would seem
when they kept me from signing in to start
hours in which to waste the tasks that paid –
painting air, juggling smoke, or transforming
five minutes of agenda to an age
of somber excuses for strategy.
LaFargue wrote of the right to be lazy,
a right the modern office worker has
so long as they can cloak it with screen
of pixels arrayed in a simulacrum
of a semblance of a service product.
We have worshipped forty hours as a god
though everything we see took just six days
from a Being who hasn't seemed so busy since.
