Going forward

I had an evening out with some people I used to work with...

...who are all still mostly more embroiled with large corporations than I am...

...so I promised one of them I would post this.

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Going forward

The corporation cannot plan
its way out of a paper bag
which—note—is not to say
it doesn't have extensive PowerPoints
to socialise the vision
for the new, division-wide, bag-exit mission
get buy-in from the stakeholders at levels
from CFO to tea lady
and distribute cheap beer and pizza
at revels
that celebrate the dragging of one thousand hapless
employees, kicking and screaming,
into progress, status, overview, coordination,
planning, steering, post-mortem, and kick-off, meetings
at cost of fifty thousand person-hours
or half a million dollars [OpEx]
which is money so well spent
for staying in a paper bag.  Meanwhile

Team Lunchpack—who were spun,
you will recall, from Project Dune and tasked
with building an organisation-wide
flexible container collocation strategy—
have been thinking outside the box,
and now are standing
a touch despondently
outside a cardboard shipping carton,
and wondering where everybody went.

Jesse James Off Broadway

Jesse James, late of the nineteenth century

I was on a poetry course, and we were given a paragraph or two about Jesse James and asked to write a poem.


The single two things that struck me most about him were the manner of his death, and:

"...much of what was written about him

was made up, and toured as a stage show

within weeks of his death..."

I only hope when my time comes I can be remembered as creatively, and that somebody sells tickets.

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Jesse James Off Broadway

...murdered by a man who is in turn murdered
by a man who is murdered by “an outlaw”
about whom countless they say films insist
on the quote marks and who robs, not steals, trains
whilst representing as a Robin Hood
all Lincoln green and tights and neckerchief
carefully deployed, but... of the man himself
little now is known. A bounty is offered
and a stage show hurriedly prepared, the script
penned by a man, himself in patient line
for the scaffold where the hangman struggles
to get the whole damned chorus neatly dropped
before the interval. He needed shooting—
to keep the drama tense—and his cousin
Bob “Robert” Ford is just the man you'd choose
for a low-living, lily-livered coward's
excuse for a plot flourish. The date was set
for Saturday, the matinee, and Jesse
(as was his name) was lured to audition
for the part of his life. He takes the part, steps out—
is gunned down in cold blood and ironically
the part turns out a whole. Bob himself is...