We won't cooperate.
In search of a signal peak, we founder,
stranded on the waste coast among
the ostrich, hyena, spiders and elephant.
Escape is required,
but earth-like movements of culture
call us to gravity.
The first tug we feel
as the gentle, managerial art of nitpicking.
Innuendo follows, accusation, threat on a whim.
In daylight walking hours we're
made to appear in the digestive lairs of bosses
the way kings once summoned suspected traitors
or imprisoned usurpers.
On Friday afternoons and Monday mornings
apprentice head-nodders prowl the halls
for us, panting and baleful as lions
having sniffed a wound, a bleeding in the air.
Unsigned confessions next, white collar noir,
the unstable eccentric, Mr. Shakedown King
ostracized from happy hour.
Our phone beeps, grows too hot to hold
whenever accusations slam from our lips
till we drop it screaming,
hands needing the comfort of ice.
Did they ever philander, gamble, drink?
If they can't stand the heat . . .
Other employees, their wives and children coaxed
into deeds of reckless destruction, make a point
of running into us in the hallway or at the mall:
the angle veers, they stumble as though tumored,
impact, and our teeth are left in wall
till someone arrives to take a cast
of our fossilized indignity.
It's only Chinatown.
If we do not cooperate
others will be found who will.