Stress Leave

At two thousand an hour
The consultant speaker spoke:

Turn Stress Leave
Into Leave Stress!

Stressing the esses and eas
In a speech well known,

No doubt, by
His bathroom mirror

The indentured congregation
Learned some rapid meditation

Weekend smiles still hooked
In the corners of their mouths

Their pockets
Vibrating on silent

Today there was a gap in the arrangement of bodies
Deepening at the rate of a rumor

The last time somebody saw her, Sue,
She was silhouette in the meeting room with frosted glass

Stress Leave
Everybody knows what that means

The way everybody knows where chicken nuggets come from
But, not now, while I'm eating

Everybody knows
Her numbers were down

But they feel for her, y'know,
She wasn't a bad person

Is someone arranging the farewell cake?
Or should we wait for the announcement?

Stress Leave
Leave Stress

What is it like, that week you get
A career in parenthesis?

Halfway between a box unticked
And packing pictures of your kids into a box?

Breathe in
Breathe out

The breath catches on
A raspy mist of tiny feathers

You ride and ride that clacking conveyor
Past the grasping latex fingers and

The chirping, the chirping
Overlaps and echoes to a din

Breathe out
Breathe out

You dare not breathe in
Now your lungs have heard the voices in that mist

And you catch yourself wondering
When did lungs develop hearing?

And in exchange for that strange power
Was it the air reserved for speech that had to leave?

Speaker man talks at two thousand an hour
There will be no time for questions.

This poem appears in

Pass it Along