Ode to a Nameless Clerk

Behind an aura of dirty fake glass her pale skin shone under the brights, and that light reflected even crisper for the glancing touch and made her clear amidst a globby haze.

Eyes could pierce when wielding that light, and hers were surely experienced in the art – green, then, in the sense of color only.

Behind her glass her mode of employ was “are you all set?” and “how can I help you?” But those eyes sent signals through glass and through flesh that in truth it is not her for you but rather you for her, a queen of half-smiles and sidelong glances, a flower of pheromones forever in bloom.

Is it age or desperation, hope or despair, that strays your undisciplined eyes over time from the curves of legs and breasts across shoulders and down the arms to her fingers, where idle thoughts of could-be futures are smashed by the elements of the earth: ignoble defeat from the most noble metal, repelled into silence by the most attractive stone?

Fitting that she lives in an ocean of stones - polished perhaps but hardly precious - a world where any notion of beauty must concede the lifeless and the cold. Among the rocks she stands a rose defiant; languid stems are green against grey and petals are red in a bloodless sea: no stone is precious when set near a rose.
The stones are all lawyers,
this ocean is law.
How can you help me?
Stay as you are.