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The Corporation
by Dan KastenLate one night an angel who had been bored with startling people
cautioned me that there was a fine line between
doing what was right regardless of price or politics
and completely setting fire to the other guys living room
practicing calculated neglect and gauging ease of capture,
I interpreted my place in the world
entitlement manifested as a box tendered under a bridge
by a homeless person who knows when the rainy season starts,
I waited for the flame to be passed to me in some coliseum
filled with discarded snake skins and freshly moved earth
dragging feathers through tar, I accepted a fate remanding,
fully aware that there was no joy in a world balkanized
by the perjury of unfulfilled prophesy and creeping elegance
and, through actions central to the discussion and baked
with the articulated needs of a champion,
my silo remained inculcated with causal marketing.
09/08/2003 Author's Note: Somewhere there is a highly paid executive consultant feeding expressions like these into the boardrooms of America.
I took notes in order to use the words against them in the court of public opinion.
Posted on 09/09/2007
Copyright © 2024 Dan Kasten
| Member Comments on this Poem |
| Posted by Kathleen Wilson on 09/09/07 at 02:09 AM Whew, the linguistic richness and image suggestivity here can move one from hilarity to sobering reflectiveness. Love the immediate interjection of the sublime in stanza one--that overlooking "angel". The "fine line is vivid and powerful, and we hold tight to it and watch. The central two lines of stanza two are amazing. The "box tendered". There's a fire in there, for sure. And what an expression. The formal offering, with overtones (I can not help hearing) of tenderness (held). The dramatic mythological stance of the last two lines of stanza two...spill over into the final stanza with intensity. The avoidance of the "balkanizing" (whew --that's quite a word) and the acceptance of an isolated ("silo" --with held goods) is strong... your angelic overview is the real goods, that's what I think. |
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