OT--Mondays, Xerox, Dolor

[Guest guest]

This poem Dolor by Teddy Roethke from 1943 is _the_ seminal statement

on modernity and the then-new office life; it also smells like a

xerox to me, intensely dry, shockingly simple, almost sucking the

life out of what's around it, graphite grey:

Dolor (1943, Teddy Roethke)

I have known the inexorable sadness of pencils,

Neat in their boxes, dolor of pad and paper weight,

All the misery of manilla folders and mucilage,

Desolation in immaculate public places,

Lonely reception room, lavatory, switchboard,

The unalterable pathos of basin and pitcher,

Ritual of multigraph, paper-clip, comma,

Endless duplicaton of lives and objects.

And I have seen dust from the walls of institutions,

Finer than flour, alive, more dangerous than silica,

Sift, almost invisible, through long afternoons of tedium,

Dropping a fine film on nails and delicate eyebrows,

Glazing the pale hair, the duplicate grey standard faces