Entirely Bad Poetry Part 3

For Mandi Ann, who expressed touching but baffling fondness for another of my poems. This one'll learn her.

The Confessional

We sit, he and I
And sit
Like lovers struggling to speak their hearts.
Head of Finance and his vassal (me).
The talk starts of promotion prospects
Relegation fears, crossbars hit
New strikers bought, misfiring men ditched
Until we remember where we are
And why.
Performance appraising reviewing assessing
Or: adding up the sums.
Six months in six mumbled words:
Works hard, hits targets, bit careless
Then questions from the home psychiatry kit.
Do you enjoy your work?
(Yes, lucky there's so much of it)
What particular problems are there?
(Head of Finance can't manage staff)
What do you like the most?
(You let us manage ourselves)
Where do you see yourself in a year?
(If I could plan I wouldn't be here, doing this)
I only speak the expected triteness, of course
And perhaps he is concealing similar
Caustic indictments of me.
Just give us a confession booth
And maybe we'll spend the hour stripping souls bare.
But really, no silent truths compress the air.
Mediocre work done in a mediocre fashion
Will never inspire great rhetorical passion.
So we sit, he and I.
And sit.