Daily Diary, Day 789:
I searched for poems with skeletons in them and came up with this one. My father wanted to be a sociology professor. He got a masters but wanted to get a PhD. However, he ended up as a middle manager for a large corporation. He did so for good reasons (the health benefits that made my mother's life possible), but he hated the job and gave me the strong message that I should have a career doing what I wanted. Needless to say he was delighted that I became a history professor, not just that, but a social historian--which was pretty close to his own field. I mention all this because he also wrote a series of rather searing, angry poems that in my mind were directed at his two major work experiences...as a young soldier in WWII (where he worked as some sort of clerk for an airfield in France...and that's all he ever mentioned of that war-time experience), and his corporate days.
That anger with being a cog in those large machines really rings out in this poem. The skeleton is from my one of my walk photos.
ORGANIZATION CHART
Skeleton of power
Where people hang like putrid flesh,
Dangling and dancing
In rigid limits of articulated bones,
Spastic creatures
Sweating and popping
To move and bend the awkward pile
In gross and muscled dance.
The clever ones,
By virtue of their skill or comely form,
Percolate from the hard and dirty bottom,
Change shape and function,
Join elite brigades
Where brain and branching ganglia
Call out the surge of power
That sucks the wind and wastes the life
Of groaning sweating privates.
--Joseph Locke