Masticate

Ok then, well my attention is distracted anyway so I might as well spare you five minutes. Keep it quick though, I have to stare blankly somewhere in a while and I’ve got an eleven o’clock sitting in silence until lunch.

Ah yes, I see your problem, you’re not letting your hair grow on the outside enough, you’re thinking too insular. Get it out of your head, it just gets all fuzzy and lost if you plait it back in like that. See Davis over there, she’s been playing with mine in the corporate store cupboard on the weekends. I know she likes it. I like it. I like to see that we’re all enjoying ourselves. It’s important. Now have you got anything else or is that it?

I’ll try to get back to you about the review early next week. Look after yourself in the meantime. You deserve it you know. Go home tonight and get some sleep, perhaps get up tomorrow and treat yourself to something nice. Here you go, and no I don’t want a receipt. I trust you on this one.

The air is holding steady around the office and cubicles. The light is bending around the corners and under the edgey floortiles and keeping the papers held down to the desk. There is an eleven o’clock meeting to be had this Friday. So here we are, were are we then? The voices and arguments rain once again and the pencils take cover in the palms of the dreamers, sweating gently into the paper leaving it corrugated and crispy. The coffee swills around in the bottom of the plastic cups. Machine delivered fuel for the fires, fuel for the desires for the outside.

The street is moving and swaying, the windows bending down to pick up the people walking past, walking fast all around. If it was lunchtime, and we’re almost there, then it would be more busy. The shops would have to become the immediate centres for the world, the shouting and the bustling would have to die down and leave the offices and move to the buzzing pubs and bars. Move to the M&S, move to the sway of the traffic lights in the clear air, high above.

Waiting for this release again, waiting for the time at which we can relax our insides and shit beautifully out of ourselves onto the steps and down onto the pavement to get kicked wherever. Pulled wherever, again to the things that we do because we once enjoyed them.

The danger of ruining these pleasures is all too apparent but it’s a thing that we must do to conform to the feel good feeling. To have to get up the next morning and do nothing is a function of the work we have done this week. Enjoy the weekend because there’s always another one coming along. At this angle anything is possible. Give me a few minutes in the morning to really understand the possibilities that you give me. You are fresh and waiting, supple and pliant just how I like you. I am, even now, old and staid and cannot possibly tell you how I want you to act for fear of being found out by one of the last people in the world who could judge me. Get into my soul and drive it around for a while would you? Get under my skin and touch me right where I don’t want you to, right where I do want you to, right where you think I’ll become interesting and quiet. Right on that cusp of saying something that I’ll regret and you’ll cherish. Even if you do it for the right reasons I couldn’t admit anything to you. I despise you and your so-called moral codes, your so-called planar religion beaming down on a jetski from the western pacific. I know what you want and it’s all to do with my demise, my failure in the view. Me naked in front of these people and them all laughing and sharpening their pencils. Good God you disgust me sometimes, you really do. Now get home. Get away from here, we grab our cases and fly to the stair.

The light’s bending around us now, a little scared and flying back to the sky.

I’ll tell you one thing as I flick my jacket over my shoulder on this summer evening. I’ll tell you to have a good weekend, I’ll tell you not to enjoy yourself too much or to do things that I wouldn’t do. If only you knew what I wouldn’t do. My face could melt straight off.