Dominique Larntz * February 4, 2012

Corporate Man

He’s not thinking; he’s just working.
In the late middle of his shift,
he waves his hand and doesn’t look up
and a symphony of technology erupts.
He’s deeply inside his task
and does not appear to hear and see
the elegance or beauty or magic
in his newfound capabilities.
He doesn’t compute the trade-offs
from magical maneuvers like that.
He keeps the books abstract,
like the rest of the world,
while he depletes resources
without fully accounting for them
or understanding them
or listening to them.
After all, if you take them up
another taxonomy level,
aren’t cows and water
and silicon and human effort
all mere resources?
It’s that abstraction that allows
corporate man to lie to himself.
Pretty soon he will take off the smock
and the smirk that helps form the mask
that hides the constant limbic fear
that drives an existence spent
working working working
to dominate the efforts of others
so fully that he cannot even appreciate
total surrender so he has to kill off
even those who hold onto nothing.
Someday, that man will end his shift.
He will look up at the time, stretch and yawn.
He will gather up his things
and leave his workstation.
You have to wonder if he knows
what he’ll go home to.