Meg. I am in shock and going to need a moment to put some words together and respond properly to this. Wow. So overwhelmed right now 😭 Thank you. Thank you. THANK YOU
I read the movement from “paid to exist” to “she pays to exist” as the poem’s darkest turn.
At first, the employer appears to be paying for her capable presence. Gradually, we understand what she pays in return: sleep, flexibility, privacy, unobserved time, invented ambition, and repeated explanations for work she already knows how to do.
That inversion also clarifies why ten years of competence cannot protect her. The new system is not evaluating whether the work gets done. It is evaluating whether she performs productivity in the approved costume, tone, vocabulary, and paper trail. “A project due September, five days old and called behind” is especially sharp because it reveals an expectation designed to outpace accomplishment. She must remain perpetually deficient so that management can remain perpetually necessary.
The orderly rhyme resembles the “counting song” imposed upon her. Every line seems required to account for the next, just as every action must produce a ticket, box, form, goal, or explanation. “Do as you’re told” becomes the bureaucratic refrain beneath the annual ceremony of invented zeal.
Yet the ending does not give the workplace the whole poem. She will provide the hours she agreed to sell and let the tickets keep their administrative names. Then she will close the door and reclaim the hours they cannot legitimately possess.
Please keep writing into this territory, Meg. You have a gift for translating impersonal workplace systems into their intimate human cost. The screen, ticket, flexi balance, annual goals, dress, dinner, and an unanswered invitation from a friend show us exactly what bureaucracy consumes when it begins to treat a dependable human being as a problem requiring continuous documentation.
Jay, thank you so much for this incredibly thoughtful feedback. You honestly blew me away.
I always put an enormous amount of thought into a poem—the tension, the structure, the layers, what I’m trying to leave unsaid—and then sometimes wonder whether any of it is actually making it onto the page. Your reading of this poem was almost uncannily close to what I was thinking and trying to accomplish when I wrote it. You not only caught the central intention, but so many of the layers and tensions I had deliberately built into it.
It’s hard to describe how meaningful that is to me as a writer. You made me feel, for once, like all that thinking and crafting actually reached someone on the other side of the poem.
Thank you for taking the time to read it so closely and, even more, to articulate what you saw. It means a lot.
Meg, thank you for telling me this. As a writer, I know the uncertainty of constructing something deliberately and then wondering whether its architecture is visible to anyone but you. I rarely get all the feedback I hope!
Your craft made it visible. The rhyme, repetition, administrative objects, and central inversion were not decoration placed around the experience; they enacted its pressure. I could follow those layers only because you placed them with such precision. Close reading is simply a reader trusting the signals a writer trusted enough to leave. I am not near the poet you are, so thank you for putting so much into your work.
I’m especially glad my response reached you, because your poem reached me first. Please keep trusting what you leave unsaid. You have built enough into the language for attentive readers to meet you there.
Meg. I am in shock and going to need a moment to put some words together and respond properly to this. Wow. So overwhelmed right now 😭 Thank you. Thank you. THANK YOU
❤️ take your time. You are so supportive of others, my thanks is to you ‼️
I read the movement from “paid to exist” to “she pays to exist” as the poem’s darkest turn.
At first, the employer appears to be paying for her capable presence. Gradually, we understand what she pays in return: sleep, flexibility, privacy, unobserved time, invented ambition, and repeated explanations for work she already knows how to do.
That inversion also clarifies why ten years of competence cannot protect her. The new system is not evaluating whether the work gets done. It is evaluating whether she performs productivity in the approved costume, tone, vocabulary, and paper trail. “A project due September, five days old and called behind” is especially sharp because it reveals an expectation designed to outpace accomplishment. She must remain perpetually deficient so that management can remain perpetually necessary.
The orderly rhyme resembles the “counting song” imposed upon her. Every line seems required to account for the next, just as every action must produce a ticket, box, form, goal, or explanation. “Do as you’re told” becomes the bureaucratic refrain beneath the annual ceremony of invented zeal.
Yet the ending does not give the workplace the whole poem. She will provide the hours she agreed to sell and let the tickets keep their administrative names. Then she will close the door and reclaim the hours they cannot legitimately possess.
Please keep writing into this territory, Meg. You have a gift for translating impersonal workplace systems into their intimate human cost. The screen, ticket, flexi balance, annual goals, dress, dinner, and an unanswered invitation from a friend show us exactly what bureaucracy consumes when it begins to treat a dependable human being as a problem requiring continuous documentation.
Jay, thank you so much for this incredibly thoughtful feedback. You honestly blew me away.
I always put an enormous amount of thought into a poem—the tension, the structure, the layers, what I’m trying to leave unsaid—and then sometimes wonder whether any of it is actually making it onto the page. Your reading of this poem was almost uncannily close to what I was thinking and trying to accomplish when I wrote it. You not only caught the central intention, but so many of the layers and tensions I had deliberately built into it.
It’s hard to describe how meaningful that is to me as a writer. You made me feel, for once, like all that thinking and crafting actually reached someone on the other side of the poem.
Thank you for taking the time to read it so closely and, even more, to articulate what you saw. It means a lot.
Meg, thank you for telling me this. As a writer, I know the uncertainty of constructing something deliberately and then wondering whether its architecture is visible to anyone but you. I rarely get all the feedback I hope!
Your craft made it visible. The rhyme, repetition, administrative objects, and central inversion were not decoration placed around the experience; they enacted its pressure. I could follow those layers only because you placed them with such precision. Close reading is simply a reader trusting the signals a writer trusted enough to leave. I am not near the poet you are, so thank you for putting so much into your work.
I’m especially glad my response reached you, because your poem reached me first. Please keep trusting what you leave unsaid. You have built enough into the language for attentive readers to meet you there.