How untrustworthy metal is

When released from the hand, using gravity
as an excuse, it runs. Runs and hides in
corners. After it tings or clatters it lies
silent. So silent. Gold is the most
untrustworthy metal of all. If iron hides in
a damp place it will rust, change, it will
miss you. So to with copper, aluminum,
brass, silver, although they do not give up
their positions they suffer the consequences
and tarnish, some may fade away completely.
Fade away like you or I.

Gold is repaid for it's patience and insolence. 
Centuries might pass and gold simply 
takes up again with someone else. 
It does this only to mock us.
To watch us pass. To grow weak, feeble
enough to drop or lose it again. After which
it waits again perhaps this time to be
reformed at great effort by someone who will
inevitably lose it. 

The next time I drop a
metal object I will wait it out. I will not
move or speak a word until things are made
right. Too many men have been done in by
metal. 

Perhaps one should cover the dropped metal
with a piece of paper. The paper will exist
then, but not the metal for the paper would
have effectively erased it. Paper has erased
other things. Paper has erased my money, my
automobile keys (metal!). They were gone.
The day was ruined, the sun set and there in
quiet alliance paper and metal did it in.

These conspirators need not utter a sound
their plan is so ingrained. Man strives to
imbue these things with meaning. Paper
covered in words, pictures. Metal formed
into tools. But when they pair up they serve
no more. 

Bad paper, paper made bad by men is most
damaging. Paper given weight by words,
carelessly, or with malice, wrought. Bad
paper is hard to look at, harder to destroy
or discard. This semi-visible or invisible
bad paper when draped carelessly over a tool
or a money makes is that much more
impossible to see. For if the paper itself
is "not there" that which is under it is
truly lost. Bad paper can darken a whole
corner, desk, or room. It can cast a shadow
on a great deal of metal and other objects
which are not even directly under it. 

 Paper upon paper in loose semi-shuffled
piles...that's the way paper likes to rest.
It requires great effort to edit, corral it,
and to what end? A densely stacked pile of
paper. Hundreds of sheets with only one
defining purpose, one deceptive face, with
not a clue as to to what lies below. Metal
under such a stack especially among many
such stacks would but most assuredly lost forever.

 Drop nothing. Put not one piece of paper
over another, nor any object, for this is
how it starts.