POEM OF THE WEEK | Jean-Marc Sens | INCORPORATE WORLD OF THE CORPORATE LEADER

INCORPORATE WORLD OF THE CORPORATE LEADER

After reading Redesigning Leadership by John Maeda

Twit for tat
subject lines @ in pseudo aphorisms—
the leader seeks to climb on his own shoulders
the kinship of his own acronyms into his last name.
Where is the ship of his leadership? Who is stirring at the wheel?
The “beta text” he calls in, a naked dressed
rehearsal of the virtual in blips and bits.
He organizes patterns through his web caught eyes,
at breakfast a gathering of bright heads
latte swirled into café au lait—why not coffee and cream?
Simplicity a raison d’être? The complex hide and seek of his secret.
“The Man” goes by the door behind the safe.
The co-founder found confounded,
the blogs, the umbilical fibre optic cords, the virtual
brighter than the world it mimics in pixelled two dimensions,
faster voices remixed, compressed,
algorithmized, the phlogiston of our age.

 


Author’s Bio

Born in France, Jean-Mark Sens has lived in the American South for over twenty-five years. Until recently, he studied for Priesthood at Notre Dame Seminary in New Orleans. His work has been published in the U.S. and Canada, and he has a collection, Appetite, with Red Hen Press.

This poem came to life after reading a book on leadership a friend, Blake, lent me. I rarely read such books but it turned out I could not take the book over seriously and wanted to respond to it, not from a business point of view but poetically and humanely beyond the recipe it gives for power and success.

 

 

 

 


This poem was originally published in Vallum issue 15:2 The Chase