I love a lot of things: coffee, croissants and a real newspaper in the morning; slipping between the closing doors of a departing subway train; Annie Hall. But few things top the feeling of publishing a new poem. Especially when that poem centers on bureaucracy and the work of the beloved and functionally essential automaton.

This piece seeks to capture the central question: Are you a bureaucrat? If so, how’s it going? Is the stereotype of torpor in the workplace accurate, or a wild misreading? Please update in any comments. I’ll send a suitably work-appropriate yet impossibly witty commemorative garment to any who feel open to weighing in. I need to know– you are a bureaucrat. What, then, does that mean and how does the work (I ask this in all seriousness) help you to realize the still-untrammeled dreams you continue to pursue in the liminal wake of life as it passes. Time unfolds, we are faced with the reality of diminishing returns.

So tell me. Tell me everything. For you are a bureaucrat, yes, but you are also– centrally and most importantly– you, a wildly creative and a vital voice rising up from the fertile ground of your own creative vanguard. You know what I mean. You know.

Sing to me.