The sky's fluorescent, cloudless. The weather
is full of talk, cubicles.

Your expression dog paddles the entire
meeting but your daydream

ricochets between the prospect of quitting
and painting your room. Seventeen

minutes eight seconds nine tick tock et
cetera and the colors still bouncing: Green

Grass Lawn, White Picket Light, Lanterns
Swinging in Six Shades of Emptiness.

Then his laugh unravels across your
screensaver mind and you notice the air

on the other side of alone is burning blue.
Windows catch fire and dissolve.

___

"Field Notes for Romance" is one of a series of office landscape poems I began writing after applying for a temporary job that required me to pass, among other things, a six-minute intelligence test and a personality test. I wasn’t hired, but at least I got a few poems out of the experience.