Risk Management Memo: Community Outreach
At first it was like one of those riddles
they assigned to keep us busy, like soldering
the white parts on a panda, building half-
boats / half-men that could reproduce themselves
with a little encouragement. I wished for
an earthquake, and it happened in ceramics so
everything that was destroyed should’ve
been destroyed anyway. It was a compliment.
In Lars von Trier’s version of my history
I would have occupied more than one bus seat.
But I was past the candy age, and this
was a colder sort of country, which sets its girls
loose in 305-square-foot occupancies
furnished with yesterday’s dormitory regalia
and suspicious electrical outlets like
pornographic slot machines for the very small.
And the social worker has her own
heavy troubles, so it’s not out of line to offer
to fix her braids in the back, or put on
a pot of maybe coffee with a West Side press
which can do other things, much like
you or me, and that’s called dimensional by
the checklist (the mild version thereof),
and I wonder if eventually checklists become
extinct in this story, and you’ll just think
hard of the only lady on earth wearing red wool
and she will start buzzing your buzzer,
which is just two wasps interlocked on the floor.