Office Fantasy.

 It was, I feel, her gypsy hair,

her tresses black and twisted

 like the tails of the cat-o'-nine,

coupled, by chance, as she passed,

with the sound of paper briskly ripped,

 that made me thus imagine her,

— she who is ever sweet and gentle—

her face to a pillar of stone

 to which she stands bound

by her slender upraised wrists,

her famished body, white and sinewy,

 bared to the stings of my lightweight lash,

harmless, but boasting a vicious swish,

and she content to be so shamed,

 to do penance by her little cries

for some peasant notion of sin.

Unlike our office, so modern and clean,

 it is a primitive world in which I dream.