Summary
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I wrote this in the midst of a meeting. If you've been privy to a high-tech corporate meeting, then you should know what I'm referring to.
If not, think of it as a lifeboat - there is no escape.
Content Type: Poetry Singles
Content Created: April 2006
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
Wrecked survivors at sea
Beaten and tired they cling
To a lifeboat railing
Glaring, hungry and angry,
At the aimless, misguided pilot
Who prattles away, enraptured
In sun-drenched confusion
Our minds wasted and withered
In the salt-blistered air
And no escape over
Predator-infested waters
We discuss at length the stitch
To apply to a patchwork sail
How I wish this to end, but
Hours melt ever so slowly
Until the meeting ends
We chose a crosshatch
But the wind had already blown
Our tattered sail to sea,
Twenty minutes into the meeting,
And it was soon understood,
No one knew how to sew
So the pointlessness of
The discussion and decision
Was evident to all, yet
Some still had questions
As if talking about solving
An obvious problem
With non-existent skills and materials,
Would somehow succeed
What sail is left to stitch?
And who knows how to sew?
And with what needle and thread?
Nay, they wonder if tasking
Out-of-sail workflow might maximize
Timeliness of deliverables,
And then frame opinion as asinine
And rhetorical questions,
Showing guff for gumption
Until, at last, you feel a shiver
A quiver of anticipation
That a gust might blow
Sending you on your way
That you may yet be saved,
From this precarious place,
A never-ending meeting
To your horror, you realize
This is no lifeboat,
And neither death nor rescue awaits.
So take your ration of meetings,
And consider the table a boat
To which you desperately cling,
Rising and falling on buzzword swells,
Drinking your fill of project charts,
And watch them raise the PowerPoint sails,
Whose animations are gulls
Swooping and pooping overhead,
And desperately pray for a miracle
That will see you to safety.