In Greenhead park's drained
  paddling pool
      a black cast iron water spout
        stands three feet tall;
a puddle of ***** rainwater
  reflects it's rusting brown base.
Red capital letters warn
      Don’t go into the Water when
        there is No Attendant,
      another sign says
        No Dogs.

This Victorian ironwork pipe waits
  for August
      when it will fill the pool with
        water and welcome
            excited, splashing children.
Round the shore
  families will
      enjoy vanilla ice cream
        or sit on plaid blankets eating
            ham sandwiches and blueberry muffins
      washed down with
          tepid coke.

I gaze at the sleeping iron spout and remember
  a blistering childhood August
      when the pool was full
          every day and
  no one thought about lifeguards
      or dogs.

  Ralph and I chased
      each other round the pool:
our bare feet felt
      rough concrete through
          the shallow water.
  He dared me
      to explore the overflow
  as it trickled into
      a dark York stone tunnel.
  I followed Ralph
      down the cold, cramped culvert
        to the starlight of distant planets.

  We walked through Skaro’s black and white
      petrified forest and helped
        Dr Who to defeat
            the Daleks
              in their ozone electric
                  metal city.

  Transported to another universe
      we boldly went
          to seek new people
            and civilizations.
    Ralph and I were
      red blooded Captain Kirk
          and green blooded Spock.

  In September
      school called us back to earth
  but the pool stayed
      full of water
        ready for
            winter ice.

Today
  I walk past the hibernating paddling pool
      as it dreams of summer fullness
  and meditate on
      the roles I played
        after last paddling
            in this pool.

Tar-dark world. The defining color is black, the inky night of her nocturnal hunts and the deep, bottomless dark of her alien retreat.

A watcher of men, she is everything and nothing. She might be too much of something, or too little of something else. Time will sort out the particulars.

There are no simple entry points – she demands engagement, and to be taken as a whole. Her discomfort is over her own allure, her undisturbed surface. It’s more about intuition and gesture than dialogue. They remain as echoes. They’ve made her beautiful in a real way, with hips and blemishes and dimples in her skin.

The imprint of the lives she begins to grapple with as her time on Earth extends, leads her to stop seeing herself as a mere conduit for her mission, and to start developing a sense of subjectivity.

Her life force is overlapping, shaping itself into a pattern of rings that simultaneously suggests a birth canal dilating, the stages of a rocket separating, and a lunar eclipse as seen through a telescope’s lens.

She's a life-form you can’t quite understand, but it’s carrying on relentlessly, like a beehive, moving backward through the constellations at first approach.

The promise of a future bright
encased in a temporal temple:
It sits among Berlin’s blinking lights,
a spaceship made to resemble.

Its oracles stood in this aluminum starchurch
dressed in sparkling ABBA track suits,
alit by glittering disco ***** with lights that search
for the future’s many loyal recruits.

But futures seldom turn out the way
that priests of the modern prophesy,
and this once sleek starship sits, decays
while stoic streams of cars drive on by.

What happened to the dreams we had
of federations who deep space explore?
Was it all just an ephemeral fad
now left in twilight, to be ignored?

Then again, this is Berlin, the place
that is built upon its broken dreams —
Utopias all cast aside, but which grace
this city with abandoned and fading gleams.

The starship sits in unending preflight,
awaiting the signal to lift off.
Its digital clock counts down to delight
but never makes it past Hasselhoff.

Climb aboard Battlestar Berlin, my friends,
fly with warp speed to nowhere at all.
Before you know it, the latest trends
will leave you yearning for total recall.

Staplers and hole-punch
Paper, signatures, and stamps
Busy, busy work
Audit error, office closed
Oncoming apocalypse

---

“If you are viewing this instructional video, you may be having some glitches with your audit processes. Don’t panic. From time to time, any bureaucracy worth its hole-punch will need to conduct an audit.

Daily dandy-desk-documented fun
Standard sunny-systematised-stapled hijinks

However, sometimes, there is a clerical error, or worse, a process deviation. If this occurs during an ordinary, 8:45am-5:20pm workday, the standard review process can be implemented, commencing on the same day, should the error be detected before 12pm, and if later than 12pm, commencing on the next working day. The typical review timelines can then follow, ideally 3-5 business days for information gathering, followed by committee consideration dependent on the 6-weekly cycle and agenda length.

Expected. Thorough. Busy. Reassuring.
All systems nominal.
Stamping and signing rates above baseline.
Working hard, at a sensible, sustainable pace. Amiright?

Unfortunately, occasionally,
something cataclysmic happens
bottom right on the risk matrix
(likelihood=E (rare) x consequence=5 (catastrophic))

Hold onto your staplers…
A fault occurs during the audit.
An audit error in the error audit.
This results in the dreaded, circular,
Paper Ouroboros Paradox.  
At this point, the
perfectly procedured
copybook committeed
faultlessly filed
bureaucracy
will implode.

The only way of avoiding POP is
a concurrent process to audit the
audit, we call this The Meta Audit.  
The bookish amongst you may want to say
that would increase the circularity
(moving POP from likelihood=E, to D!)
Don’t worry, we run the Meta Meta
Audit to make sure that never happens.

Our favourite galactic bureaucrat avatars, the Vogons, were the first race to encounter the pure, paper-curling hell of TMA. That is why these instructions are written in poetry, of sorts. But not Vogon-authored poetry, of course, even though
the quality
and honestly
the policy
of the potential use
of these directions
or sections
or connections
for torture
Have never been directly investigated.

The KPI for TMA is known as the
Kafka-Cockroach Distance
measured in imaginary cockroach lengths (icL).

Under potential conditions of
POP, the TMA KPI KCD starts at
42 icL
     and counts down with
     every fatal meta error:
       -Information presented to audit
         committee in triplicate
         instead of quadruplicate,
41 icL
      -Audit presentation containing
        27 slides instead of 26,
        as clearly outlined,
40 icL
     -Email about colonoscopy sent
       to audit address list instead of mum,
39 icL
     And so on.

You’ll know when you reach 17 icL,
You’ll see the cockroaches.
Conveniently, this makes measurement simpler

Now you know how to calculate your Kafka-Cockroach Distance, you can audit your audits with perfect assurance and insurance.

---

This bureaucracy
Kafkaesque catastrophe
Dear Douglas Adams
Thanks for giving me words for
Processing my processes

--Entry 0001--

At daystar distance, light-time 9.2
Reached orbit of a lonely little sphere
Inhabitants, galactic refugees
Lost beings fled for working atmosphere

From orbit I observe a solid wall
Bisecting the small planet into two
Is this the same as walls they made at home?
Before, their earth in ruin, they withdrew

Remote-scan sensors indicate two groups
One group in light brown garb, and one in beige
Communities uncoupled by the wall
No circumstantial need to co-engage

The beings take position near the wall
Their blasters in the air, as if to war
Will need a closer look to understand
Assembling ground crew for a recon tour

--End Entry--

--Entry 0010--

Away Team One have scouted both the camps
And both took great attention to explain
That cosmic contrasts sit between the two
So never to be reconciled again

The 'Northers', in their light brown town, *****
To Iris, God of Moon, a monument
The eye a symbol of this watching one
A stone displays his holy document

‘O God of cycles, ebb and flows of life,’  
The stone acclaims this lunar deity
The tablet smooth on left, and rough on right
Abiding token of fertility

The 'Southers', in their beige, build one as well
But this, a shrine to Os, the God of Bones
His sigil skull expresses loss and death
Indelibly recorded on his stone

‘O God of dying, born of earth and sky,
Hereafter and rebirth as well as death’
This stone that sits adorned with crook and flail
--is baby-smooth on right, and rough on left

Away Team One weaved worry through their tale,
A looming war was set to decimate
So, find a concrete plan to intervene
And hope and pray that we are not too late

--End Entry--

--Entry 0100 --

Away Team Two report the wild events
This sphere will be immortalised in verse
For these effects of war upon this day
So tracked that all our plans could not reverse

The first explosives wall-bound from great arms
Start slowly causing breech and then a fall
The northern and the southern lands revealed
Sameness no longer hidden by the wall

And for the first time see the glory stones
Sit, monument atop, aloft on shrine
An eery match in form and font and voice
A paired, reflected hail to the divine

An astral silence, weapons come to rest
Then reverent 'Northers' fetch their hallowed stone
While devout 'Southers' hold their tablet too
A meeting reuniting moon and bone

And suddenly as tablets are aligned
The warriors unblinded to the con
Of holy tablets two, and each with God
At origin the two were only one

The beings face-to-face now with their God
Examining the reassembled tome
Not Os and Iris, but Osiris there
A single God writ on a single stone

So smaller differences in brown and beige
And seeming larger gaps from death to birth
       Now seen complete, more holy as their whole
       Dualities reflected in one soul
Now possible a new united earth        

--End Entry--