Sunday, June 2, 2013
Sunday Night Poetry
THE DEPARTMENT OF INSPECTIONAL SERVICES
Wants to give you advice, embossed
While taking your tolerant hands
And making an X through your dotted life.
They talk. Word gets around. Suddenly
You're a wart in the file. Clerks in fitting
Wool suits peer over their glasses and nod.
You're the misarrangement walking
Around with a letter in your rib
And a summons on your myopia.
Having a very nice day, the Inspector
Processes your annotated dictum
Smugging in his hum little cubicle.
--S.K.
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4 comments:
//You're a wart in the file.//
Ohohoh... I like that.... see, that what you get for talkiing politacl toads.....wart files.
Hope it was a good weekend& stuff.
Quite a portrait -- especially that tasty little last line -- of a type of person I sometimes struggle to avoid becoming.
Several years ago, I read about a young man who wanted to open a local theater in Brighton. He wanted to feature works by local playwrights.
He got sucked into the horrid whirlwind of bureaucratic regulations and codes; and when he discovered what the various regulations he had to conform to would have resulted in, the theater would have held only 10 seats.
I wrote this poem after reading about this sad story.
I feel great hope in your singular understanding of the suffocating role blind bureaucrats play in administering ever-expanding, ever-more-constricting Codes of Conduct dreamt up in the abstract by people who may never have been in touch with earthy, day-to-day, flesh and blood reality in their lives.
When lofty theoreticians and petty-minded would-be tyrants make the rules, which are then administered by dutiful, unimaginative, automata -- minions -- shriveled souls devoid of empathy and imagination with power limited to obeying Authority -- Creativity, Ambition, and eventually Hope die.
"... The feet mechanical to 'round --
A wooden way -- of ground or air or ought --
Regardless grown --
A quartz contentment
Like a stone.
"This is the hour of lead --
Remembered -- if outlived --
As freezing persons recollect the snow --
First chill --then Stupor -- then -- the letting go."
Our great friend, Ms Dickinson, not only had piercing powers of Perception, she also possessed the Gift of Prophecy.
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