A Head-In-The-Wall's Lament

A Head-In-The-Wall's Lament - Part of Ms Mukta Week

Day in, Day Out, I must wallow in dirt

Dirt on the block beneath my face

Dirt on the shoes my lips must embrace

Dirt on the socks my eyes must admire

Dirt on the feet which tend to perspire

In front of my humble head.

Day in, Day out, I must wallow in dirt

But if I obey, I shall not get hurt.

The head-in-the-wall footslave is correct – he is indeed surrounded by dirt day in and day out. But it is holy, sanctified dirt, because the dirt he is referring to is:

·         The residual dirt stuck to the wooden footblock beneath his face from the soles of the boots and shoes of his betters. This is dirt which he should consider it an honour and a privilege to study and admire in between serving his customers, even though his rusty neck-collar prohibits him from being able to lick or taste the residual dirt. Occasionally, however, he can smell it

·         It goes without saying that the dirt still stuck to his betters’ shoes and boots is even more holy, and must be savoured in the mouth since, although it is fundamentally just common-or-garden, street dirt, it is nevertheless mixed in with the texture of the customer’s footwear, be that leather, plastic or rubber, which makes it fit for a footslave’s mouth or stomach

·         Dirty socks are, of course, an occupational hazard for a down-in-the-dirt footslave – both dirty in the sense of being tarnished by physical dirt, and in the sense of being imbued with the wearer’s personal and unique footsweat. But whilst the humble head might yearn to taste and inhale the odour and dirt on a customer’s sock, he must practise self-restraint and public-footslavish decorum, for he is NOT some sort of privileged household or personal footslave who gets to take off his mistress’s shoes or boots and sniff her socks at the end of the day; he is just a public footservant, restricted to admiring his customers’ socks, and contemplating what might have been had he managed to pass his personal footslave examinations at the age of 21 (all public footslaves are failures who have proven to be inadequate when it comes to serving a personal footmistress in a private capacity). Still, sock dirt cannot be ignored when you are a humble slave permanently positioned at ankle-level!

·         And the same goes, of course, for the customers’ bare feet dirt – especially in the summer when the slave must tongue-attend to sandalled feet. Not all his customers will be foot-fastidious, and the slave, though a public servant, will have a very close-up and personal view of the customer-master or mistress’s toejam and sweaty feet – the same feet that in the winter time are covered in sweat-absorbing sock

So, he can lament all he likes, but the humble head-in-the wall is indeed always going to be surrounded by dirt – and rightly so.

What the ignorant fool has conveniently failed to mention is that:

·         He is surrounded, more generally, by dirt and detritus in the smokers’ corner where he lives, works and breathes – s his superior customers treat his ‘home’ with the utmost disrespect, soiling it not just with their footdirt but also their everyday litter, and cigarette ends. Their casual disregard for his surroundings only serves to emphasise their contempt for the humble head who daily must kiss-worship and lickshine their dirty shoes and boots

·         There is even a tray of muddy dirt – provided by the Municipal Authorities – for the footslave’s customers to deliberately dirty their footwear in lest the latter be too clean for a footslave’s consumption

·         The slave himself is dirt – a dirty slave. Small wonder then that his current customer-mistress finds him both risible, and contemptible, at one and the same time! He had better obey her, and do a good job on her dirty sneakers, or he shall indeed be hurt – with the public-use whip hanging on the wall next to his humble, dirt-licking head!