Tokyo

§ of Petitions, entry unnumbered 7.
No one is rostered to receive this.

Ask anyway.

The old word for it was supplication.
The newer word is inquiry.
Whatever gets used here, unspoken, files under neither.

Two notices stand at the mouth of it, illegible from any distance a body would call safe.
That, too, is an answer, just not the one anyone filed for.

Sine die. Without a day set.
The clerks who coined that outlived their own office by centuries, and it did them no particular good.

(No salt at the sill.)
(No wonder Anything gets in.)

"Please."
"Please."

The dark past it does not escalate matters.
It only continues, the one
liturgy still practiced here:

said to no one,
logged nowhere,
absolved by
nothing in particular.