From the Twentieth Floor, and: Ha Ha Only Serious

I can take the elevator downstairs for a soda, or I can get a glass of water from the cooler. Not a glass, a plastic tumbler; not the rigid kind, but a soft one with a rounded lip, water droplets adhering along the cascade. I am taking a break from drafting a memo for an executive vice president; in Iraq a convoy of contractors is moving along, looking busy, waiting to be shot at, bombed, and driven into. “I really liked it at first,” I overhear the actress who temps say from her chair in the copy/mail room. I think she’s referring to the design of the org chart she’s perpetually updating. In Uganda, a rebel group made up mostly of child soldiers destabilizes the northern regions in a way the government either cannot control, or will not. I’ve lowered my chair level with the guest chair across from my SMED desk. My guest, my boss, left as I took a phone call from someone on an island off Massachusetts. The phone call is over, and no one is sitting here with me, but I’ve left the chair down even as I strain my shoulders typing from below. That’s better. I can control the chair. I can vote in government elections. What else. I can keep paying attention, keep feeling something, keep talking, keep learning how people acquire power. Or just keep clicking around. In Bermuda, an authoritarian from England links to a grammar stickler from Lesotho. The stickler lives in Paris. Sometimes the stickler just observes local variations of idiom. These kinds of sentences I feel as free of threat. So much communication seems to me intended as fear-inspiring threat. Sometimes I’m distorting my experience, sometimes not. It is quiet in the office: a little typing, a phone conversation in a distant cubicle, a click, a cough, something plastic being torn.

Ha Ha Only Serious

I cry every day. I wake up and look over at the books Lying across your side of the bed. I make bread because I have to knead something.

My heart feels heavy Like I dropped it on myself. I am spinning a cocoon of paper. When I emerge I’ll have wings of dust.

Every second in this city Everyone judges everyone else. And themselves too. They only give gold medals to people who take them.

A mockingbird keeps me up all night. Bird, you’re a little ahead of your entrance. Come help me wash away all the flour. Sing me the song of the garbage trucks and cops.