The poem never mentions an office, a boss or a spreadsheet. The title, "Middle manager," does all the scene-setting, and the six lines that follow work like a confession made at the water cooler by someone who has stopped pretending. The speaker claims he does his job better asleep than most people do awake. Then he admits the price: he can't say what he is, or what he believes. The central idea is that a role which rewards not-thinking can empty out the person who fills it, leaving a man who is easier to read in his bank balance than in his own conscience.
The opening is all deadpan boasting. "In walking sleep" compresses the whole routine of commuting, sitting in meetings and answering emails on autopilot into a single image. "Walking" suggests movement and "sleep" suggests no one steering. The verb "attend" is the smartest choice in the poem. It means to be present, as at a meeting, and to pay attention, as in "attend to business." It also means to wait on someone, as an attendant or servant does. The speaker is not running the business so much as serving it. And the boast that he does this "better than most thinking men" has a sting in it. If sleepwalking outperforms thinking, then thinking is not what the work asks for. Stresses pile up on "walking sleep" and "thinking men," so the two states face each other across the first stanza like rivals.
Then comes the turn: "but would to God I were clear." The register jumps. "Would to God" is an old, prayerful wish, far from the flat language of business, and the grammar admits defeat in advance. "I were" is the subjunctive, the mood for things that aren't so. This is the only moment the poem reaches upward, and it asks for something modest: clarity. The simile that follows is unexpected. We expect "clear as day" or "clear as glass." Instead we get "clear as my own money," which is a financial image. Money is the one thing in his life that is countable, unambiguous and fully accounted for. "Clear" can also mean free of debt, or net of deductions, or clear-headed, and all of these drift through the line. The word "own" matters too. He possesses his money more securely than he possesses himself. Even the sounds quietly connect "men" and "money" across the stanzas, as if the poem were hinting at what the thinking men are really thinking about.
The last line stands alone: "I stand for little." The stanzas shrink from three lines to two to one, and the poem seems to diminish along with its speaker. The line is nearly all single-syllable words, and the only two-syllable word, "little," trails away at the end. "Stand for" carries several meanings at once. It can mean to represent, as a manager represents decisions made above him. It can mean to tolerate. It can mean to defend a principle. In every sense the answer is "little." The verb also answers the poem's opening. The speaker has been walking asleep, and now he stands still, upright and awake enough to take stock. Whether that is the start of waking up or just a more precise account of the problem, the poem doesn't say.
The form is as pared back as the speaker. There is no rhyme and no end punctuation, and the only capitals are "I" and "God," which sit at the poem's two poles of self and something larger. Its short lines let each word carry weight, and the shifts from complacency to longing to bare admission happen almost without transition. The tone matters, too. It is not angry and doesn't invite pity. The speaker states his emptiness in a level voice, which makes it harder to dismiss.
That restraint is what makes the poem worth reading. It can be taken as workplace satire, but its question reaches beyond the office. If you are skilled at something precisely because you have stopped asking what it is for, what are you left standing on? The poem ends by leaving the reader with that question.