Office Haiku: Poems Inspired by the Daily Grind

Poems! About your office!

We work hard at our jobs, and in return we are frequently plagued by bad coffee, strange smells, paper cuts, other people, and, at least once a week, Mondays. So what better way to tackle the absurdities of the modern workplace–to get a little peace!–than with Zen poetry? In the first poetry collection to do just that, Office Haiku contains witty haiku divided into chapters including “Monday Mornings Suck,” “Paper Cuts, Office Equipment, and Other Maladies,” “Existential Malaise,” “Departmental Meetings,” and, of course, “Anywhere But Here.”

Informed by a lifetime of work, James Rogauskas’s haiku speak for themselves (and everyone else):

Sitting at my desk
As proudly as any serf
On his scrap of dirt.

“This has to go out”?
And I was waiting for desk
Fairies to type it.

I sit wondering;
Can someone die of boredom?
Only time will tell.

If I could read minds,
I would certainly have a
Better job than this . “I thought I knew all the reasons to hate cubicle life, but James Rogauskas have given me a pork barrel full of laughs to ease my deary Monday mornings. This book should be required reading for all corporate managers!”–Mary K Witte, author of Redneck Double-Wide Edition