Most immediate tasks have no recompense. This social media schedule,
for example, as if I walk my roof at dawn, leaning onto the parapets,
leaning into sunrise. Kickoff, am, pm and post-event posts. I lack the emprise
for a complete schedule. So, the half-made schedule. The draft poem was this:
I want to buy so much stuff, and I want to buy it on credit then never pay it back.
I wanted to name Desmond Beckett before he was born, imagined building
a small dovecote in the backyard, but instead dug garden beds and built low,
slightly tilting brick divides. I am agnostic about schedules but faithful to strategy:
I made this special schedule for you, without strategy. Gallant, I send it early,
knowing it will remain unreviewed, imagine printing it on pearl-colored paper, revel
in the bureaucratic beauty of a schedule with no design except itself, the beauty
of charts and graphs and slides, of timetables. The parapets prevent accidentally
falling into the sunrise, but I’d prefer that to this damnable marketing brief.
On behalf of the team I note that although this is a roundtable discussion
there will be no roundtables in the room and no repercussions for their lack.
I go to a shared workspace, sometimes, with a new, difficult-to-open window.
Imagine the courtyard is a canal and below the window a basic boat que c’est
bateau. But it’s enough to float away from work and capitalism and drift on
a lazy wave to somewhere reasonable, where everyone understands that being
overwhelmed and rageful is the only feasible response to knowing how much
our taxes go to war and the contractors of war. Somehow I’m a poet paying
taxes and making social media schedules, interviewing for other jobs via
text messages with robots. There are no detractors of poetry, just disparaging
non-listeners or former and secret poets. I would buy so many different serums,
so many button-down shirts in various bright prints like my dad used to wear. Batik
shirts. Guayaberas. Shirts with ornate prints like 18th-century British wallpaper,
and then I would buy out of print art books and ugly crocs, cut my hair every four
months instead of once a year. Die it pink-magenta ombre. Amazon orders as
an archive of distraction from everything, everything, from knowing that children
might sleep through a bomb blast then wake up in dust, or never wake, that I
make social media schedules while my country sends bombs everywhere,
everywhere, while empire carries on but somehow, something bursts through,
though prior power remains and I feel dumb saying things like “burn the castle,”
because what is a castle? This campaign has no strategy except to please
my supervisor, I promise. Once again, I abstain from strategy, from belaboring the point.
