Boxes packed

Boxes packed, sitting

in a stack on the floor,

near the door, flaps

folded and tucked, waiting

for the last movement.

Pictures taken down, walls

empty yet bearing marks

of what had been before,

windows of meaning, closed,

a life worked and lived,

a life retired, retiring.

And it, too, is good.

Photograph by Lynn Greyling via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission. 

Work Space Poetry

Work space can be important, and in large organizations tends to follow whatever management theory is in vogue at the moment. In the 1940s and 1950s, big open spaces were all the rage, especially in functions like finance and accounting. The 1960s and 1970s brought a lot of enclosed offices; my first job at a large corporation in Houston found me in an 8x12 office that had a large storage closet. Things changed in the 1980s and 1990s, and cubicle farms could be found all over. In my workplace today, we have a mix of cubicle farms and regular offices.

I have wondered if there is a certain poetry to work space, a certain rhythm and cadence and language and flow and, well, poetry that creates these places where work gets done. A kind of rhetoric for work space – the cubicle as haiku, for example. (For the record, I’m not down on cubicles; what I consider the best speech I’ve ever written was written in a cubicle.)

To continue reading, please see my article at Tweetspeak Poetry today.