The new company logo is a torch inside an obelisk
inside a five-pointed star inside a sixteen-sided die
against a backdrop of blazing sunlight. It took years
of focus groups, an in-house creative team collecting
only the smoothest, flattest stones from the banks
of the minor tributaries of each river beloved by
our target demographic, research into their concentric
patterns of worship, the lives of their saints, Saint Flypaper
and the case of the missing anvil, miracle of the giant
tropical lake found on Saturn’s Titan Moon so like that box
of tissues in the conference room that never empties
in the face of ongoing organizational betrayal.
At the quarterly meeting of shareholders, the chief officers
unveiled several new prayers for the test markets: nothing
is impossible—it is your responsibility to make it so,
let us search for management in a stargazing field, let us
sustain new synergies among alleged victims, give us
this day our daily sales cloud. You are the blue arrow
pointing down to a box half-shaded in gray on the flowchart.
Here is your cubicle, your stapler. Burt is your team leader
though this period of consolidation. He developed
an upgrade that renders the old product obsolete
for which he received a fat raise and the right to keep
his desk utterly bare. The shareholders believe
he is an oracle, that he peers into that empty, elegant
veneer, his mind a crescendo underlying a persistent
musical pattern, the end of desire itself, one killer app
for the one Oregonian suffering under sunset’s vague lilac,
one step towards the eradication of mediocrity among
normal children. Your team emblem is a kitten,
your alibi is that you never watched an entire episode.
When the supervisor asks how the product has changed
your life personally, be vague, say you dream less
of free diving with dolphins in bloody water and more
about your fear of local elections. As you peruse
the company directory, try not to notice how many names
have been crossed out, be grateful for the key card hanging
around your neck even as the metrics tell a different story:
what the target audience had for lunch, dinner, dinner, lunch,
barriers to accuracy, ways to boost stamina. Dear co-workers,
let’s dress up in golf shirts and do karaoke with the unpaid interns,
let’s hold a séance on the lowest level of the parking garage,
rewrite the cost savings report in chromatic shorthand, go viral,
erase all the voice messages in the world, let’s paint zeroes
on our faces with printer ink and insist we are as impeccable
as executive letterhead in ivory, as close-knit and happy
as we appear to be in the video from last year’s Christmas Party,
more efficient than anti-crepuscular rays, more worthy
of outlasting the outsource, and lucky enough not to know
just how narrowly we escaped the meandering volcanic haze.