Time is a Toy: The Selected Poems of Michael Benedikt

Of Friendship vs. Conflict-of-Interest: Meditations From an Office Desk

196 of friendship vs. conflict-of-interest: meditations from an office desk Friends, friends, what are friends? There are, I sometimes think, some people who have only what you & I would probably think of as being only the most minimal definition of the word “Friends” —By that, it would seem, such people only rather circumscribably mean, at best, Simply other people they might find, somehow, to cushion & protect them, hopefully, from having to live out their working lives, on a day-to-day basis Surrounded by an atmosphere of total disdain, abject contempt, & general hostility —Thus preventing them from having to endure too many hostile frowns during their long day’s labors; thus invoking also their rather dismal (I think) version of an “up-beat” or “cheery” atmosphere Around them, seemingly—but yet not quite exactly—like what you or I might normally, & rather more celebratively, call “Bubbles inside of, or afloat above, a champagne-glass” —In their melancholy case, “Friends” being really only just grim buffers designed to do the cushioning & blocking, against various maybe even far worse calamities & catastrophes than censorious frowns Re their clumsiness, &/or incompetence, from coming disastrously to pass —So, in that case, being surrounded by “Friends” like that, Is, I think, sad; & a bit like someone resigning himself or herself to living out what is, timewise, certainly a rather significant portion of a life Walking around at work sheepishly, & with the shuffles; & in the midst of sheer paranoia Amidst hordes of possibly only imaginarily self-sworn “Enemies,” i.e., anyone who may have realized, somewhere along the line what a slipshod flop their fellow office-worker is, 197 Protected by fundamentally only half-hearted teams of “Allies,” i.e., by their co-workers’ own unofficially—or even officially—hired gunmen. * Of course, for far too many individuals who think about friends that way, the likeliest “Sworn Enemy” Is probably reality. In that case, there’s a problem, then, should such a person’s so-called “Best Friends Forever” Be called upon, basically, merely to produce a distraction, so as to dissuade what might otherwise be a healthily reality-facing, independently problem-solving person From permitting himself or herself at any given point from receiving the obviously very seriously sad impression That he or she is in fact an ineffectual jerk at doing his or her own work; & that he or she may perhaps be ineffectual in general, at handling anything at all, particularly successfully & well; & Is thus, perhaps, what we might call a total “Fuck-Up.” —& So, in this way, we come to confront the phenomenon here at our own overly-busy office-desk, piled high with the work we’ve completed in the “Outgoing” message-box (most of it subverted completely by plethoras of memoranda in the “Incoming” message-box) Of people who have absolute authority over us, business-wise; But who are just no good (or even just plain lousy), at their jobs. —For isn’t the abovementioned, all-too-commonplace, & really quite dreary definition of “Friendship,” the one, inevitably, we find called into play, for example By the glad-handing vice-president of some company in re the president of that same company, should it ever be even-so-slightly pointed out That the incompetent v.p. screw’d up by sloppy mayhap, on the proverbial “Crucial Contract Affecting Everything”; & The definition invoked also by any messy under-foreman of a factory, in re the foreman-in-charge (just in case some simply reasonably grumbling groundling even dares to hint that he feels critical, about how the aforementioned messy under-foreman has been running things); 198 & Then, too, there’s the inefficient & uncareful assistant principal of some grammar-school In re his apparently sincerely but in any case rather suddenly-expressed “Fondness” for the principal-in-chief, who hired her or him— especially should some poor supply-less instructor point out, for example, that the aforementioned assistant principal forgot to sign requisition forms for, for example, all the school-supplies for the forthcoming next one thousand school years (Oh, wotta dangerous-tostudents -&-to-education itself goofball individual!; &, Oh wotta danger to all personkind that type of person is, too, not to mention perilous to the mental health of the youth of all the earth!); & yes, sometimes too Even a poet will sometimes mis-employ the word “Friend” like some grungy misnomer, & wave that word about back & forth in the breeze, in relation to an editor or a critic whom he or she has glad-handed up...