"I don't care about feelings. All I care about is the bottom line." ~ Director, Major US Electronics Company, 2006
"I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness..." ~ Allen Ginsberg, HOWL, 1956
In the cube farm abyss
of the concrete megapolis,
frigid and calculated
as the bottom line,
where keyboards tapping, mice clicking,
we concocted manuals, answered email,
squawked into phones, and went blind,
cross-eyed deep in labyrinthine spreadsheets of Excel,
(all at the same time),
management coached us to aspire to be ~
Japanese salary men!
Raising cups of sake,
we praised the noble practice of
karoshi!!!
(falling down dead at one's desk from overwork).
The next mandate, are we are ~
Kalihari bushmen!
Survivors in the desert of our promise to The Street.
No staff, no budget,
just a pointy-headed spear and a loincloth
embroidered with the company logo.
We were handed The Effective Executive,
learning in sixties-speak (in 2006),
to be successful men (no wo-),
then discussed
the possibility that we were overstaffed.
(Um.
See above paragraph.)
Was it then
or the two-hour session
on status report formatting ~
six-point fonted eyecharts,
columns that hide,
links that jump you here and there,
Action items! Ownership! Deadlines! ~
where I fantasized about retiring quietly
to a corner of the floor,
dousing myself in gasoline, and lighting a match?
The lunatics, the truly nasty ones, were awarded fellowships;
the festering corporate monks, the politically popular
micromanaged and scapegoated;
the worker bees deep in their hives
handed over their lives
to that tag team Jekyll and Hyde.
They say they don't want Yes Men,
but really they do.
No one shall call the emperor naked,
no matter how hard his nipples on that cold day in hell;
no one shall point out the dead moose on the table,
no matter how high it stinketh,
on pain of removal
at the annual Fall Fun Fest
where hundreds of souls (a.k.a. "resources")
are put to rest
(their offices stripped of bed curtains that very night),
to be resurrected in another concrete cube
where humanity means nothing
beside the bottom line.
Hey what if, instead,
we awakened
say, on the shore of a crystalline lagoon?
Coconut palms waving at the island volcano,
lava-floe fecundity,
red hibiscus popping,
frangipani wafting
sweetly in the potent air?
Where brown bodies bathe in gentle streams,
each inch of the world pregnant with jungle
green as the art of the land fills its canvas,
its ardent artist selling his wares
along the rice field terrace?
Can we hum to the thrum of honest work,
seaweed and rice
cultivated and harvested
with the tide, in its season?
Multi-task, demanded my boss.
In your morning shower,
plan your response
to each point, every question, any doubts
that may spew forth in your meetings
of the coming day.
Me, I learned to multi-task
when I was sixteen ~ quite proud was I.
Decades later, it took me four years
of Zen meditation
to learn to do one thing at a time.
In my morning tub, I tingle
with each friendly scritch of loofah
against my warm slippery skin,
fragrant bubbles clinging
to the hillside of my shin, and
the soft freshness that lingers long
past my frangipani-petaled bath
in the garden of Time
where
each fleeting, eternal moment
is its own bottom line.
