Cleaning Out My Desk (V3 - Title Change)

[dukealien]

I'm very interested in this discussion, and hesitating to post as I am not sure I can offer a decent critique. I'm no scholar (not that I think that's needed for critique, mind) and a poet more by virtue of stubborn need than any skill.

I think, to make this kind of thing work, you have to write from the wound. Get right inside where the injustice hurts the worst, and speak that in poetry. Drop all the technical terms, because that's far too much for the poem to carry in addition to reaching the gut response.

I do believe there is a place for didactic poems but I also believe they are excruciatingly hard to do well.  They have to be so damn good that the reader forgives you for teaching them something they didn't like to hear of. (This is not meant as a slur on anyone's response here but only as a general comment from my own failures with this type of writing.)

Personally, I'd like to see this reworked.

Write from the wound - very good point (and good critique).  It's more or less what I was attempting, but in the poem too dry and theoretical, ideological.  Need to get into the wounded life of a manager who's hurt (and lost his job) because some fool kid who couldn't do the work called him a racist and heterobigot, or one of the Disney employees who was forced to train his own semi-legal replacement while being fired because the replacement was cheaper.  [Aside:  that actually happened to me, though not with Disney, and my understudy was not the nationality you might expect.  Company discovered its error in a few months.  But I'm too easy-going to have made a fuss - felt a failure, yes, but not actually wounded.  Hmmm.]

How could it go... "You're sad, my friend, to watch me empty out/the desk where we sat while I taught you how/to do my job - don't worry, I won't pout/..."

Thanks for the read!  Heavier edit needed - or just neutron-bomb it, leaving only the title, and start over.