positive thinking

My rook, the opposite of Churchill’s Black Dog

Here’s a poem I wrote a few weeks back, in March, about a low-point I reached at work. Hopefully it’s self-explanatory.

The Bully
 

The doctor signed me off sick last month
With work-related stress
I was being bullied by my boss
I’d had some kind of breakdown
 

Don’t get me wrong
Just me and him in the car park
One on one
I’d have liked nothing better
Than to take him down a peg or two
Exposing the little Hitler
For the puffed-up corporate lickspittle he was
But that’s the whole point
Bullies never pick on those
They know can fight back
He knew I needed to keep the job
I had bills to pay
Food to put on the table
Just like everyone else
I couldn’t do a damn thing
 

It was death by a thousand emails
By a million shitty little tasks
Every day, on top of my day job
In his quest to humiliate me
And break me, piece by piece
To prove to his own bosses
What a hard driving son of a bitch he was
Using the ladder of my broken mind
To progress his career up the company
 

Being bullied is like catching a horrible disease
It takes over your life
From the moment you wake
Till you fall asleep at night
There’s no safe haven where he can’t find you
Even when he’s not there
He’s bullying you in your thoughts
That’s when things start to get really black
When there’s nothing else
Except the bully
 

For half a year I sucked it up
Refusing to let the jerk beat me
Until last month, when something snapped
A thousand miles down, at the very core of my being
I was driving in to work
When I pulled over to the side of the road
And burst into tears
I had come to the end of the line
 

I went to my doctor the following day
My story tumbled out like spilled ink
God bless that man, he sent me home
He listened, and believed what I had to say
I was no longer alone
It felt like a huge weight lifting from my shoulders
 

For three days I sat zombie-like, staring at the walls
Didn’t change my clothes, bathe, or eat
Til the tension began to slowly unwind
From the tightly coiled spring of my body
 

That was a month ago
Lately I’ve started going for long walks
Picking up pieces of my soul along the way
Sticking them together
With the band-aids of daffodils
The cries of rooks milling
Round their sky villages
It’s March
Spring is shooting out the earth like a rocket
Everywhere waking up what had seemed dead
 

Today, walking down a sunken lane
I came across a rook in the road
With a broken wing
As I approached, it hopped to the left
And scrabbled up the bank
Crippled as it was
Its life instinct clinging on
Maybe the wing would mend
Or maybe it would starve, or become some fox’s supper
But while there was still a chance
It hung on
 

I emailed an official complaint
To our HR department
I’ve decided to stand up and fight
And expose this bully for the slimeball he is
Even if it costs me my job
He’s in with senior management, you see
They always are
That’s how come they think they’re invulnerable
Well, this one’s got a wake-up call coming
And if I ever meet him down some dark alley
On some distant day in the future
Or in hell, on my turf
He’s gonna wish he’d never heard the name
Frank Bukowski

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