Clearance

"Fool," flicked the lips with a spit - as I, Fist, cleaned the desk clear, clear of the debris of these past few working years.

"Fool! Look: buried in a box under the table, way over two years of filing, simply not done. And simply not checked for, not asked for, not missed, either. Not even a single sheet of it. Not one.

"And all the unanswered letters, and deleted unchecked emails, and half-scanned memo's - the corners perhaps showing a blue-biro doodle, da-da. All nonsense going nowhere making nothing, all.

"And so what: the tick boxes of your moronic manager, at the door grinning with a bad joke each morning? While the beautiful temps have floated on through, and are now gone, your name and face for them forgotten.

"To spend your time here, like this - fool!"

The body took a pause, here amongst drifting piles of shifting paper, behind the usual closed door, up on the fourth floor. Then:

"What clearance would you have instead, O lips?" asked, I, Fist. "The whole clearance of this sweating city, its spires and crowds and towers, to run once again in the blue-bell beds of a forest, there amongst the meandering fingers of Spring's first luminous light?

"That the curl of a yes? But to face away from doings and searchings, lips, into that daydream begs another question: how then to sleep well, in the deep, dark, dead of the adult night?"