Ladies
Young man, don't you think
you're a little young
to be calling in
sick twice in one month?
What are you? Twenty-
nine? Young thing like you.
Ever hear of medi-
cine? We look healthy
to you, son? Listen:
Let your little girl
aspirations dis-
solve like a spoonful
of saccharin in
Sanka. Our children
also crave freedom
and we resent them
for it. Look in my
pocketbook: Tampax,
Kleenex, Valium, Tums,
a panoply of
pharmaceuticals:
anesthetic cas-
serole. I re-
member my third month
too, when you can first
feel the florescence
beginning to dis-
solve the edges of
your brain: you acquire
a new stutter and
an appetite for
network television.
Oh yes, you have sat
on your modular
sofa with death and
found it disturbingly
comfortable.
Disembowled matriarchs:
each arrives with a
meticulous flourish
approaching the same
stairway following
the same footprints each
morning everytime
like the same robotic
ambassador
or the same fossilized
weapons inspector
envoy each bearing
with her her own quaint
curious
anachronistic
idiosyncratic
luncheon rituals
and patterns of
interaction,
elaborate pantomimes
in a soporific
compromise, life the
animal with its slime and tendrils and teeth
now reduced to a humming box of light
from the hour when the sun is cracked on the horizon
drooling its warm yolk into the upturned beaks of shrieking birds
to the hour when the parks are reclaimed by hideous
possums and narcissistic raccoons.
You span these hours riding an ergonomic swivelchair
losing ground against the slippery slope
of the asymptotic curve of information storage and retrieval
and the shifting, diminishing dunes of the job market,
far from its theoretical limits, while you hold court
in a pit of overflowing file folders the person who
had this office before you didn't throw out because
the person who had it before her left them.
And it is at precisely this hour when the coffee
sparks in you a cornucopia of inspiration snaking
like a vine sprouting flowers of ideas
but you know that this enthusiasm too shall pass
and the warm pleasure of obsolescence
is like a shot of poison in your arm,
as you pivot taking it all in
locked in the safedeposit box of a secure income,
your future a long soft white shimmering tunnel
of health insurance counting the dollars between
catscans.
How many times will you return to this same waterfountain
whose water and your blood are intermingled, synonymous,
going through motions in this harsh flickering pageant
in a mannequin mimicry of gesture and inflections
in this sexless hospital of our collectively curtailed intentions.
A bureaucratic masquerade drifting through the atrium,
chit-chatting across a desert the color of bone drained of all cocktails,
each one a scarred rib in the skeleton of the dead dinosaur,
conducting research for teachers who would be better suited with
bulletproof vests.
You think you don't feel well, well
you should spend a day in my arthritic apparatus,
these tendons a map of inflammation,
pentium flakes embedded in my skin.
We are all mutilated in this office
having hacked off limbs to fit through the doorway
now, amputated, like adult stillbirths of capitalist patriarchy,
we huddle in this aquarium, our limbs twisted and paralytic,
squatting before humming machines,
we watch the sun through a microscope slide set high on the wall
our lifetimes piling up like forms in an overflowing outbasket.
I am little more spontaneous then a wristwatch
slackening, unwinding, losing power
on a wrist that keeps shaking until well into the second chablis
and yet marking the seconds with uncanny precision,
biorhythms wired to a punchclock.
Our husbands are tenured
numb in their indifferent scholarship
they are bored
mumbling through halitosis lecturehalls
until their next application of the nametag
at the next conference in Syracuse
to accept the award-winner of the Salt
Hill hypertext contest and an evening spent drinking
tequila with colleague Jeff Parker and bullshitting about
Derrida and Hobbes.
A cascade of manila folders dry like dead sycamore leaves
rustling across the rheumatoid afternoon.
A bone spur of a schedule calendar
deflated sleep. I've recoiled enough from a glimpse
of freedom and would prefer
two weeks in the Bermuda islands.
A shipwrecked tanker on a TV schedule,
age has dealt me two heavy blows:
1. My teeth
2. A complicated affair involving iodine and urinalysis.
My childhood traumas intact and stored in
a stable directory structure. It cleanses me,
this umbilical between me and this computer
with its angles and desktop publishing software.
Its unstable mechanisms no more arcane than my own.
I experience the world through an
inflamed carpal tunnel, diarrhea, and
a distant toothache. These #s and %s. 200 MHz & above.
But I have good days too.
A parade of tiny children carrying big clipboards
moves past. They are bespectacled and inventorying
fire extinguishers. May this ibuprofen blunt me for
sweeps week. This springtime of my undertaking.
Having earned in this respect
a trifle measure of the privilege allotted me
by my station. I understand how the personality is
like a gyroscope, intensely stable if anchored by
a single point. I am middle-aged and may shift from rinse
to spin anytime.
There is weather on my veranda.
There has been a train collision in my heart.
And in my mind another high school murderer.
I sure hope you feel better young man,
by tomorrow, and we will cheerfully
interrogate you in the morning breakroom.
You see, we are all sick.
And we come to work on time.
1999