Blurred lines and double lives

Citation

Marrasso, I. (2019), "Blurred lines and double lives", Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal, Vol. 32 No. 5, pp. 1615-1616. https://doi.org/10.1108/AAAJ-06-2019-048

She spends days staring at spreadsheets, enters invoices like a robot

Log on and off as empty as a bucket

Spends nights dancing to a different clock: to ten minute lap dance intervals,

and could bounce a song as much fun as a hard on.

Tony resembles a monkey in a cage biting an apple,

“How was your weekend?”

Didn’t do much, read a book, some ironing …

She excites for secrets hid the corporate wear

Blocks her path with his arms, “Liar”

His hand, her knee, falls the primate down.

Grow thin the days, turns eyes to dust as if she’s aged fifty years plus.

Each morning too much, until Jeremy employs a cheeky smile, an English accent, flirty

emails, dirty pictures. Kisses down her throat sweet as honey.

Such the fun forbidden romance, drunk on love a serpent visits the dark.

Erect a maypole, the Highland fling, each fantasy or dream

Moon through windows call a number on the clock

Fluorescent glow through dark, buzz a bird, but warnings don’t get heard because she hasn’t

feasted in years, and fruit so juicy to linger here.

“Izzy we have to let you go”. She is that magpie flown into a pane

Why?

“You know why, but officially it’s your lack of ambition. And Tony, well, you brought it on

yourself. What did you expect?”

He’s as cold as the machines they sell, but reality hits hot like a snakebite.

A naughty student gets expelled, and Eve from the garden.

If she’s crossed a line hasn’t he?

Jeremy is Judas pocketing the silver, and she still can’t see the colour of his eyes for the glow

in the dark.

Or is there another line? Unclear the reason sins bear hold.

Might a shadow life, an insult greater still

Weeps openly at her desk for the rest of that afternoon. As if she is a martyr, she stays until

the end, makes them churn as butter until they virtually turf her out by the chin.

To be fired, is exactly that, an ashen black blemish on her resume, like wearing a scarlet letter

burned into her skin and worn forever.

The girls call discrimination! “You should fight for our rights”

Still reel the snap of a trap to walk into like a blind beggar

He said, “We don’t want your element here”

Another slur, a smear, resembles racial segregation and we are a breed they especially need to

keep within certain boundaries, corralled as sheep.

Within weeks Michael and Jeremy enter the club, with veneers so disgustingly smug.

A double standard sits as a pill gone rancid half way down her gullet.

This is her workplace, get out!

Days and nights flip like pages in a book when she came to understand

They visit the underworld spend time with girls

Their shadow selves, entertain clients at will.

Need leave it here in the dark, hidden from all that’s white, a wife and kids, the daylight cogs

of palms washed and clocks tock.

A façade of how things work

Their masks must know no cracks no sign of silhouettes

To risk the new car bought, private schools sought, holidays planned and paid.

No, she must go.

She had no business taking naked pictures from their minds to the workplace, turning day

into night, erasing those lines was another type of betrayal, on a much grander scale.

A scapegoat sets the blame so corporate Australia, and family man[1], can carry on exactly the same.

Choices made for one hard to pin down, a dual citizen whose equity resides on both sides.

But daylight feels like a lie

A sleepwalk game that ends the same every day.

Now she dances without restraint, hair spins in the fly of a pole

No push and pull of moon and sun

The contest over, a balance hangs.

Note

1. “Family man” is a term used by Lara Travis, a Melbourne songwriter, in a song called “Down on King Street” from the album Pineapples, Greenbacks and Glitter in the Air, 2018 by Fancy Yellow Music.