Tag: poem

The Management Consultant

Could you open the door for me, please?

 

No, no, no, you’ll never advance like that:

Tailing with a “please”, like a servile rat.

And that ambiguous opener, the tip-toeing “Could”;

Let them know its non-optional, a must, more even than a “should”.

To do this, we bolt the imperative to the verb:

“Open the door”, at volume, so as to ensure that they’ve heard.

And for godsakes dispense with that awful “for me”;

Allow the cretin to retain some sense of their autonomy–

In fact, let them trust that they’re worth something to you:

A fronted adverbial — “kindly” — will do.

But why are we turning door knobs at all?

I’ll make a conservative sum to rile your gall:

Three seconds to open, a hundred times a day,

Thirty minutes a week, two hours per pay;

In a calendar year you’ve lost a whole day’s labour–

Ergonomically speaking, it leaves a grim flavour.

I’d direct you to this electric model — how its glass does so glisten —

And this way, you won’t ever even need a colleague’s assistance.

Skimming Stones

Is there a crueller sport 

Than skimming stones?

I implore you to opine otherwise.

Just look:

A child of nine,

Face screwed in earnest,

Scouring stones, weighting stones,

Appraising stones like a student

Before the avocado basket.

Not flat enough here,

Not round enough there,

Disfigured, unshapely, aeronautically impaired.

But then:

A truffle in the rough!

A wonderstone! Smoothed and plumped

By God’s own hands.

Yet the child admires no more than a moment,

Encircles twixt thumb and index

The stone,

And adds imperfect technique to a perfect tool.

Six skims? Seven? “I counted eight!” they cry,

Having jettisoned perfection to prop up the lie.

Invention

There are just so many of them

And they all have ideas.

Do you know how I’ve scraped and trawled

For a tuft

A tuft

That hasn’t been trodden, retrodden,

Rucked over by sixteen-pairs of aluminium studded boots?

 

But now I think I’ve got it —

Just in time, too.

And I tell you:

One unplucked wisp of green

Is worth a mudded life

In sullied nails.

The Memo

Do you ever worry

That you haven’t quite got it?

That your mailman span and

Dropped on cobbles,

Hastening to deliver your memo?

That, come to think of it,

Your memo’s still pocketed

In his neon-orange jacket

(Which he was entombed with, having died on the job)?

Of course,

You can’t RSVP to that

Which was never received.

Perhaps, sooner or later, in due course,

A gravedigger will exhume the

Good-body-good-mind-effective-relax-efficient-grind-

Memo,

And slip it

Into your expectant claw.

Gone

“No, no, there’s nothing left here.”

 

My arms, I crossed them.

I’d been cheated.

I was ready for spite, salted spite.

 

“No, no, there’s nothing left here.”

 

In the chest: deflation.

I’d been stirring the brew into

The early hours, when you might as well

Be a dream.

 

“No, no, there’s nothing left here.”

 

I span, saw, and knew it to be true —

There was nothing left here.