… who wrote poetry, one hesitates. But here’s a page of Zinkhan’s stuff.
Read it while you can. I imagine the American Marketing Association might want to to take it down.
Here’s a perfectly competent poem of his, capturing the bureaucratic surreal:
“after hours”
Late at night after he thought
that everyone had gone home
the senior accounting partner loosened
his tie and
walked around the offices
splay foot
bare
“You’ll catch your death of cold”
pronounced the newly hired secretary
when she caught him one evening
unaware
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Bare. Unaware. Good rhyme, well-placed. And unaware has a nice duality to it — caught him unaware; i.e., he didn’t know she was still in the building. But she too is unaware — unaware of the deeper weirdness in this place, in this man — she’s a new secretary, after all.
Zinkhan, in this poem and others, is highly attuned to the Kafka-nature of The Office (a nature played for laughs in the television shows by that name), the weird disjunction between a buttoned-up rational senior accountant and the same man a bare-footed creature at night roaming the halls. Werewolf story. The naked animal beneath the suit. Catch your death in these cold climes.
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Update: As I anticipated, the poetry has now been removed from the website.