The Bosses
Guy walks into a bar, sits, turns to his friend.
Friend says, “How’s the new boss?”
“A fucking bureaucrat,” leaves it at that.
Boss having memorized the HR handbook
to the eleventh bullet point of a subheading
had just done his cut and paste job,
sent the email to remind and reprimand the staff.
But the friend is just nodding, guy shaking his hand
as if both where quick-sanded in the dream of reason,
or worse, had turned that sort of corner where
lurk the spooks on the prowl for poor schmos
in Kafka’s world, specters of the system, or the system.
Another day, another bar, another schlepper,
standard issue rolling laptop briefcase.
Same question. “The boss?” “A fool.”
This is no joke unless the joke is on us
nine-to-fiving it under archetypes:
the lout, the micromanager, the clown,
whatever style it takes to fuss and dissemble.
Anyway, this guy is here to drink, not scaffold
a third sucker come to deliver the punch line.
There will be a third one, still no joke—
fidgety, fatigued, shirt coming untucked,
a splice of middle age and come to think of it
the new Middle Ages too with fealties to lords
in office towers or corporate parks.
The master’s corveé everywhere in evidence:
private elevators, golden parachutes,
heirs apparent to the new America
for which our fellow here needs only a hostess
to guide him to some booth in some craft beer,
tapas, gastro pub. He is running late.
No surprise. His day is at some boondoggle
where the principals do nothing, know nothing.
Peep into the cubicle where he’s vying for promotion,
pictures of the kids buried so deep in paperwork,
a tesserae of Post Its with “remember,” “to do,”
like an evidence map in a crime too tangled to resolve.
And that is just analog, with another more frazzled,
spread-so-thin version of the man in digital
if you unlock his phone, check his computer screen.
We’ve lost the symmetry of the joke,
its classical proportion, its three-part structure
and paperwork is not entirely to blame.
In his tousled prêt-à-porterish, post-yoga ease
boss is waiting for our guy in gastro pub
sipping from his green-chai hibiscus thing,
here to follow up on an email he claims
was very difficult to write. Yeah, run of the mill
Dear John stuff he follows up with consolation lunch
and small talk about the kids, the traffic,
while our guy peruses the seared and poached,
organic, local and other gibberish around a French fry.
Boss will have his regular, lobster paella,
then down-shift to explain why promotion didn’t take.
Do we need to see the beast, his gaze as from the passing
bars, behind the thousand bars no world; the lout
inside his iron cage, a “nullity,” says Weber.
Listen to him: “core competency,” “tension in the system,”
“moving forward,” “sea change,” like a rusty weathervane,
noise showing where wind blows, new Middle Ages,
its magnificos and grandees sipping chai, a new America,
with micro-managers and bureaucrats and clowns. No joke.