POETS Day!: Langston Hughes

Well, happy POETS Day, all and assembled. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday! This week we are going to celebrate the late week break out of a mid-afternoon Friday because it’s our duty even when circumstances conspire to stymie our best laid plans if not send them agley.

The kids are just out of school so there are no school nurse-mandated pick ups and summer camps have yet to start up so arrow-related injuries are pretty rare and flu season is macabre now and a horizon’s horizon away anyway. My children are useless in this escape from responsibility regard with at least one of them busying himself with growing a peach fuzz mustache and both of them while away the afternoons by the creek. Who would want to get out of that early?

Workplaces the nation over were already reportedly understaffed as the narrative of fewer people wanting to work continues on its merry way and that was before first-week-with-the-kids-out-of-school beach trips further depleted the pool. Any absence will be noted, so plain old sneaking away, already inelegant and uncreative, would seem unwise.

A clever tact might be to prey on managerial frustration at teetering on being understaffed by introducing the idea that you have something contagious that could further thin the workforce. Walking around coughing might trigger a fear of losing the whole staff when the prudent would send the obviously sick individual home, but talk about inelegant and uncreative. You might as well pull the fire alarm (do not pull the fire alarm.*)

I give you Havana Syndrome. I you aren’t familiar, Havana syndrome is a collection of symptoms that started popping up somewhere around 2016. It was experienced by US and Canadian diplomats serving in Cuba. For the most part it sounds like tinnitus but with occasional blasts of sound sounding like the vibrations from an open car window as it speeds down the highway.

Last February, a declassified document allowed the possibility that pulsed electromagnetic energy or maybe ultrasound could be the cause, but an FBI report from a few years ago stated that no evidence of any such existed. MRIs on Canadians and Americans suffering from the syndrome showed signs of brain alteration if not damage. I couldn’t find a direct answer on that, but the specifics are secondary. You aren’t going to march into your boss’s office and announce that you are suffering from Havana Syndrome. You are going to ape a few of the symptoms.

Wander around the office tapping outlets and light fixtures. Say to anyone you pass “What is that sound?” Start early. By two o’clock you should be frustrated and half-yelling “What do you mean you can’t hear that? Where is that coming from?” Throw in a few “It seems stronger over by the coke machine but when I go over there it sounds like it’s coming from the copy machine.” Annoy everyone and make it clear that you are not only at zero productivity, but you are distracting everyone else. You are a net drag.

Maybe you should take the rest of the afternoon off. Just like that, you are sprung and catching a few innings of baseball at a local watering hole. Congratulations.

Today’s POETS Day poem is from Langston Hughes. Jazz was a huge influence on his writing and I think this work, aside from the obvious that it’s about composing music, is an excellent example of that influence. It moves and has a peculiar but steady beat to it.

Langston Hughes was a giant Langston Hughes in the Harlem Renaissance and as far as I can tell had no ties to Alabama, but I do, so I chose this work from his collection.

Enjoy.

Daybreak in Alabama

Langston Hughes (1901 or 1902 depending on who you listen to -1967)

When I get to be a composer
I’m gonna write me some music about
Daybreak in Alabama
And I’m gonna put the purtiest songs in it
Rising out of the ground like a swamp mist
And falling out of heaven like soft dew.
I’m gonna put some tall tall trees in it
And the scent of pine needles
And the smell of red clay after rain
And long red necks
And poppy colored faces
And big brown arms
And the field daisy eyes
Of black and white black white black people
And I’m gonna put white hands
And black hands and brown and yellow hands
And red clay earth hands in it
Touching everybody with kind fingers
And touching each other natural as dew
In that dawn of music when I
Get to be a composer
And write about daybreak
In Alabama.

 

*Unless there’s a fire.