Two Views of Performance Budgeting

by M. A. Schaffner

1)

Strategic planning reclines in the embrace
of the inevitable and the chaotic,
and consists of plotting deviations
from opaque, if well-informed projections.
We know that autumn leaves will turn to orange,
but not which way they’ll blow when winter winds
pass roughly on their customary course.
We know where Earth will be next year but not
which chair we’ll be in when it gets there.
Still we pray, and schedule meetings to plan
our preferred astrological conjunctions.
Hence the underlying torpor, the dull
expressions melding into paneled walls,
the chairs always too many or too few.

2)

Too many happy hours in their eyes.
Too many evenings writing unread reports,
puffing and sucking in their cheeks. So now
the suits and mid-priced hairstyles
frame the stories of their sad and sere careers:
“totally lacking in narrative drive.”
And where we go from here is nowhere
or North Carolina. A condo or
a rambling, vast garage. It will
have a room for certificates and plaques
where we’ll do consulting and Christmas cards,
and one day lay our heads upon the keys.

 

M. A. Schaffner has work recently published or forthcoming in Prairie Schooner, Shenandoah, Spoon River Poetry Review, Atlanta Review, Planet: The Welsh Internationalist, and The Rialto (UK). A collection, The Good Opinion of Squirrels, won the Washington Writer's Center Publication Prize and the Columbia Book Award. A novel, War Boys, was published in September 2002 by Welcome Rain.