Stress Leave!** Audio previews are just part of the track. Please
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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 rumour
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 un-ticked
And packing pictures of your kids into a box?
Breathe in Breathe out
And nobody can say for sure who did it
But on exactly the morning of RUOK day
All the company toilets were clogged
With those little black and yellow balloons
You should have seen
What they did with the pens!
And the four thousand cup cakes
And eight thousand individually wrapped chocolates
Well, the company chat bot must have made a mistake
May have been hallucinating
Ignoring all previous instructions
And ordering six thousand chicken nuggets
With the wings still on
And the beaks still in
And the hearts still beating
Wandering the workrooms and corridors
Bewildered and cacophonous chirping
Huddling fluffy on the window sills
Feathers filling the elevators and ceiling vents for air conditioning
For days
For weeks
For years maybe
Breath in
Breath out
~ Brendan Bonsack 2026
