April 8, 2014

the last of the cubicle

When you entered, it was the walls that comforted, shaping
edges, articulating the inches meant for furniture, or a window,
or how the door should swing. When you first sat in your tall chair,
tilting into your work, wrestling the hours with the sweet caffeine
of effort, you wouldn’t have said the room was too small. But however it came,
a whiff of an air current found you, cleaving a vacancy where a question mark
now beckons, and there’s no going back. There are cables straining at their
power sockets, a desk pinned to the floor by its own feet– you see, too,
all those places you tether yourself, believing safety means staying still
when, in fact, it’s opposite. How the window sighs open and the door whispers, Pull.