demiurgent: (Creative)
demiurgent ([personal profile] demiurgent) wrote2003-07-24 12:01 pm

Another poem, because you've been so good.

They remade his office into a conference room.
He had his desk, his chairs, paintings
and posters, maps of Australia,
scenes of his sloop sitting on mooring.
He sold the sloop for lack of use.
Too many days and nights in his corner office
that no longer belongs to him.
They made it a room for teams to meet
inpersonal. Walls, chairs, a table.
A wire basket of pens, a pile of pads.
All things for all people, they say
which makes it nothing. Impersonal.
They even took his whiteboard down.
It was nice, in a blondwood cabinet
rolling slats like a rollaway desk.
Individual, distinct. Like his pipe.
Like the mark on his face
where the mole was removed.
The walls still have hooks
the crannies exposed now.
No bookshelves, no filing cabinets,
no phone or folders or fanfile folio
he used to keep notes in.

[identity profile] edg.livejournal.com 2003-07-24 09:51 am (UTC)(link)
Very interesting. I hope you don't mind my posting a quick (and very unpolished) response. (15 minutes, about 600 words.)

The room started to fill with the smell of smoke about twenty minutes into our meeting. The chairman looked around - "This is a non-smoking building, gentlemen" - but nobody had a cigarette lit, and I couldn't see any visible smoke anyway. There wasn't a telephone in the room, so one of the interns was dispatched to call maintenance. We looked outside, both into the hallways and out the windows of the corner room, but nobody else seemed concerned and there wasn't any indication of a fire below us. Nonetheless, we kept the door open as we continued the meeting.

"That smells like pipe tobacco," one of the younger men said suddenly. "When my father smokes his pipe, it smells exactly the same as this does."

The chairman shrugged. "Maybe someone in the office downstairs is smoking. We'll find out when maintenance gets here."

He'd thought that all eyes were on him as he cleared his throat and continued with the briefing, but we were actually looking behind him; on the off-white wall, shapes were appearing, outlined in black. There was a faint squeaking sound as well, as though someone were drawing on a whiteboard. As we stared, the shape of a sailing ship began to appear from the lines and curves drawn on the wall, almost as if someone were sketching from memory.

The chairman turned and saw the drawing appearing behind him, gave a start, and began backing toward the door. "I see," he said, "someone's having a joke in the next office." As he left to go next door, the smell of pipe smoke intensified, and several of the other men in the room began to cough. When they stood up to go outside, almost everybody else did as well, leaving me and one of the other members of the committee sitting at an empty table.

I noticed that the drawing of the sailing ship was complete, and the invisible hand holding its invisible marker was starting to draw something else - I couldn't identify the shape, but it was far more fine and complex than the ship had been. It looked almost like a coastline, and I had just said as much when the owner of the hand began to fade into view. He was an older man, of average height and build, wearing a tweed suit with reinforced elbows. Even from behind I could see the pipe in his mouth, and as the smell of smoke grew ever stronger and he continued to draw I suddenly understood the form on the wall to be that of Australia.

I looked over at the other man still in the room, who was clutching the edge of the table and looking desperately frightened. "Go," I told him, suddenly understanding why this had been the only vacant conference room, and he got up and bolted for the door, overturning one of the chairs in the process.

I glanced back at the apparition, who had finished drawing Australia and was now looking over at me. I could see the small scar on his face, just under the corner of his mustache, and that sealed it for me. "That's where my chair used to be," he said, in an old, tired voice.

"I know. Will you be sticking around?" I asked.

"Maybe," he said. "For the moment, I just wanted to give the place some personality." Then he vanished, pipe smoke and all, leaving the sketches of the sloop and the continent on the wall of the room where his drawing board used to be.