The Oakum of the Office

Once I wandered, weak and weary,
Through the screens that glimmered dreary,
Through the code of years forgotten,
Through the systems none adored;
Forty winters, brightly burning,
Forty summers, still returning,
And the wheels of labour turning—
Turning, turning, evermore.

Twice the hand of Fate dismissed me,
Twice the cold world ceased to list me,
Once six weeks before it kissed me
With another office door;
Then six months of applications,
Silence, doubt and calculations,
Till I crawled through desperation
Back unto the treadmill floor.

Now at sixty, bent and blinking,
In a chair of endless thinking,
I am chained to ancient logic
Written decades gone before;
Patching functions, tracing errors,
Waking long-forgotten terrors,
While the glowing monitor mirrors
All the years I can’t restore.

Like a prisoner picking oakum,
Strand by strand I split and soak ’em;
Every ticket, every broken
Piece of code becomes one more.
Someone else incurred the lending,
Someone else postponed the mending,
Yet it falls to me, unending—
Technical debt forevermore.

And at home the air grows brittle,
Every word must weigh a little;
Even laughter, once so simple,
Finds no easy open door.
She is weary, I am weary,
Rooms once warm have grown more dreary,
Two souls walking, tired and leery,
Past each other on the floor.

Then one midnight came a tapping—
Not a raven, wing-flap flapping,
But a thought within me rapping,
Softly at my chamber door:

“Must you work until you’re broken?
Must the bargain go unspoken?
Must your life remain a token
Paid to employers evermore?”

“Surely,” said I, “I must labour.
Mortgage, bills and every favour;
Safety is the only saviour—
Work, and earn, and ask no more.”

But the tapping grew much stronger:
“You have served them long—and longer.
Are you richer? Are you stronger?
What, exactly, is this for?

“Count not salary, but needing.
Count the mouths and bills requiring.
Find the sum that keeps life feeding—
Nothing less, and nothing more.

“Name the number. Mark the year then.
Make the distant ending near then.
Give yourself a path made clear then—
Set an exit from the door.

“You need not climb another ladder,
Win another title, sadder;
You need not make your CV grander—
You have proved yourself before.

“Work four days, or three, or fewer.
Take a role that leaves you newer.
Trade the grand career illusion
For the life you hunger for.

“Let the ancient code keep breaking.
Let the corporate earth keep quaking.
Do your work without mistaking
Their emergency for yours.

“Document and raise the warning.
Leave on time each blessed evening.
Keep some strength for Saturday morning.
Keep some spirit in your core.”

Then I saw, beyond the glowing
Of the screens forever showing,
There were roads I might be going
That I’d scarcely seen before:

Not retirement as surrender,
But a life grown smaller, kinder;
Less a worker, more a wanderer—
More a husband than a chore.

Maybe mornings without meetings.
Maybe slower, gentler greetings.
Maybe jokes met not with freezing.
Maybe laughter as before.

Maybe income somewhat thinner,
Yet the days immeasurably richer;
Maybe time becomes the victor
Over status, fear and score.

So I turned unto my raven—
That dark thought which sought a haven—
And I asked it, almost craven:

“Can I really leave this shore?”

Quoth the Raven:

“Find your Enough.
Then—nevermore.”

The Architect of Unseen Engines

 The Architect of Unseen Engines

Beneath the pale phosphoric gleam
Of midnight’s humming server-room,
Where silent diodes wake and dream
And fans like distant tempests boom,
There walks a mind that shall not rest —
An architect of the unexpressed.

Not his the clang of forge and flame,
Nor sail upon a moonlit foam,
Yet pulses bright with secret aim
Within the datastream’s vast dome;
For where the hidden currents glide,
There thought and will in code abide.

From iron decks of radar’s gaze,
Where flickered signals pierced the night,
He traced in disciplined arrays
The spectral paths of unseen flight;
And in the hush of circuits deep
Taught restless storms their watch to keep.

Through finance halls of numbered fate,
Where pensions slept in columns tall,
He bent o’er systems intricate
And heard within their muffled call
The need for swifter breath and bone —
A pulse more lucid than their own.

Then rose the Cloud — vast, formless sea —
Where microservices like stars
Hung trembling in dependency,
Bound close by unseen Helm and jars;
And there he sailed with steady hand
Through AWS’s shifting sand.

“What flaw lies buried in this seam?
What bottleneck constrains the flow?
What knowledge, like a half-formed dream,
Waits patient in the logs below?”
Thus ever questioning, he wrought
New clarity from tangled thought.

He built not towers carved in stone,
But tools of quiet, nimble grace —
To answer GDPR’s tone,
To map a customer’s fleeting trace;
And by his craft the queries ran
Like streams obedient to plan.

In Git’s firm chronicle he set
A discipline of ordered change,
That scattered servers might not fret
Nor drift through entropy’s wild range;
Ten instances in concord bound
By wisdom’s simple, steadfast ground.

Yet more than code his labour weaves —
For in his mind a lantern burns:
“How may this knowledge grow like leaves?
How may each colleague’s insight turn
From solitary spark confined
To commonwealth of sharpened mind?”

Thus stands he where the systems meet —
’Tween human need and logic’s art —
Where deadlines press with hurried feet
And commerce strains each fragile part;
Still calm within the whirring din,
He finds the fault — and mends within.

O unseen Engineer of streams,
Whose engines hum though none behold,
Thy work, like Coleridge’s woven dreams,
Is half in mystery untold;
For though no mariner he be,
He steers through vast futurity.

And when the final logs grow still,
And monitors fade into night,
Yet shall his questioning spirit thrill
In realms of ever-seeking light —
Still asking, as the currents run,
“How might this better yet be done?”