COMA-19

COMA-19 was meant to excuse
A small, necessary operational snooze.
Then bright red dashboards appeared,
Everyone panicked and feared,
And it turned into blanket abuse.

Each gap got a tasteful amnesty stamp,
Like throwing a lace shawl over camp.
No tracking, no shame,
Just a wholesome new name
For a dead little patch in the map.

The form was for rare kinds of still.
Instead it became managerial fill.
“Why’d nothing get done?”
“We were blessed by this one.”
And the graph kept climbing uphill.

What COMA demands, at its heart,
Is the look of unbroken exert.
So when labor went dark,
They just whitened the mark
And called it continuity art.

A pause can be healthy, that’s true.
This was not what the doctrine would do.
This was hiding the hole
With a pre-approved scroll
And a checkbox that said, “Nothing blew.”

The amnesty form had such grace
It could make any absence look chaste.
Lost a shift? Lost a week?
If your language was sleek,
COMA welcomed the gap to its face.

One supervisor, sweaty and vague,
Filed six in a row on one page.
When asked if that tracked,
He said, “Technically, act
Like I’m not on the edge of a rage.”

What started as mercy got bent
Into optics-preserving cement.
The humane little crack
Was industrialized back
Into polished administrative scent.

Even idleness deserves a name.
That’s not, by itself, why this came
To smell fucking cursed:
It was used to reverse
Any evidence labor had shame.

So if COMA grants rest with a grin,
Check how many blank hours got in.
If the cure fits too well,
It’s not kindness to tell.
It’s a laundering service for spin.

They filed the forms as a joke,
While taking a massive long smoke.
The dashboards were green,
The dirtiest seen,
While the servers completely went broke.

They laundered the hours they lost,
No matter the terrible cost.
“We’re continuously up!”
They yelled in a cup,
While getting entirely tossed.

“Pre-approved downtime,” she said,
While climbing right back into bed.
The form covered tracks,
Like bureaucratic wax,
While the actual project bled.

They fucked off the whole afternoon,
And filed a form to the moon.
“Amnesty granted,”
The manager chanted,
Like a bureaucratic buffoon.

The optics were perfectly clean,
The dirtiest trick you had seen.
They hid every flaw,
Behind COMA’s law,
And fucked the entire machine.