Color Of Our Cubicles

Fontarino’s hair shouted shiny black hallelujah’s up
to the office ceiling, weakly tiled in offed winter days.
“You got your department budget done? It’s Tuesday.”
Carol fought the mirror back into the drawer—disbelief
on the line, her new reflection unruly as a flopping fish.
Man, how cinematic the world gets as it crumbles down
our own dark well, in shattering German ceramic or
carbon fiber on a race car. Fingernails grind pit walls
of sienna soil, tree roots, rock, as we fall. The vast
hard surface beneath our feet abandons us so fast
in a gravity of emptiness! God, all the cement, wood
and asphalt we somehow swallow. “Please give me
until 5 p.m.” Puddle-voiced. Crumpled. He sensed it.
But all pockets long emptied for the job, he just nodded,
and accepted the good side of Carol’s face as a way out.
What was Fontarino to do? Weep now, and vow revenge?
“Cool,” he said. Office somewhere in a robot’s intestines.
She ate a mint, spread budget sheets dense as war maps.
Ledgers and numbers must learn the smack of tears.
She married one man for his laughable dreams, a painter,
then finally fucked a man for power NOW with money.
No real muscle to her husband until last night, funny,
when he found a right cross. Her lawyer cared less.
His famine sex is food line time and grab--“Mine!”
The trick is to get out and disappear, taxi tender.
Her lover calculates everything, moral as needs be,
taking depositions now coolly among the parapets,
while she broadcasts bruises throughout the work day.
He’s respected mostly for perfect flight. “He’s quick.”
And what was it, touching cheekbone, reminded her
of the Flacken boy, dead this week in war, because oil
is what we do. Fuel is who we are. Random rocket fire
into the Green Zone in hopes of killing any American
who believe with their bodies in pre-emptive strikes,
CIA evidence, redneck empire, yahoo war, petroleum.
“It’s just hard to imagine that brick-haired boy dead,”
her mother said as the news entered her throat, shot
back out again in our old friend disbelief. Imagine
street hockey kids destined for mortar shells,
the same way they tore up headlands for homes,
all the green hills and red hair churned to death
by the same sweeping roundhouse clocked Carol.
We’ll never understand the fight ring we’re living in.
The score! The score! Find a corner! Check the score!
Right. Why all office walls are painted the color of fog,
because absence gives the sobbing beast a sense of space.
We leave our cubicle unmarred each day by our one story.