The Safety Manual
Tuesday morning, loading dock, fluorescent-lit and cold,
a box of OSHA wisdom, forty pounds of bold
advisory print on proper lifting form,
spinal alignment gospel, regulatory norm,
and he bent at the waist – not the knees – to heft the load,
because the irony was already in the road
waiting for his foot, patient as a punchline
that knows its timing and respects the bottom line.
The safety manual didn’t save him,
the safety manual didn’t behave,
it rode him down to the loading dock floor
and filed no incident report,
the safety manual, thirty-seven chapters deep,
bounced off his skull while he tried to sleep
through the ringing and the fluorescent buzz –
the safety manual never does what it says it does.
He filed the incident report himself,
pulled it off the very shelf
where the safety literature lived in alphabetical order,
completed every field with the disorder
of a man writing his own indictment, checked the box
for improper lifting technique, cause of injury
the manual he’d been carrying in the box,
and sent it up the chain with the full dignity
of a man who has decided that if the universe
is going to make the point this directly
he is at minimum going to disperse
the paperwork correctly,
and the HR department processed it
without apparent awareness of the joke,
filed it with the others, dismissed it,
and sent a reminder about the annual spoke
of the safety training cycle coming due –
would he be leading the session again this year?
He replied yes, attached the diagram he drew
of himself mid-fall, and made his position clear.