Template:Dkt regolamenti homunculus
Queen: Good Regolamento. Your ornery battalion grows apace.
Why so many hands aligned in defensive form,
When ill-conduced to aid our onward march?
Regolamento: Th’untended thatch of shin-tangling rulery sleepeth not.
Slim principles of good behaviour — short days ago, a waxing star
Play out their scenes as half-recollected dreams.
O, happy reverie! Was there e’er so sweet a time?
Was compliant life so fair? Who knew what glinting jewels we held!
Jewels once, but crush’d to charcoal in our hands.
Queen: Doth mere statutory obeisance bring you low?
Nuncle: Not so low he couldn’t raise an army, liege.
Regolamento: ’Tis true: the count of heads giv’n to policery is fat —
But knotted perimeters o’erlap and contradict.
Bossy strictures grind upon our chasest industries
Our smallest act hemmed in by rainbow rules of ill-scop’d application.
Ours not to make reply nor reason why —
Ours to but be silent and, sans fuss, comply.
Queen: What causeth this?
Regolamento: The ropish scars of distant misadventure
Give the fib to saintly visage.
The watchers’ shrill response to past imprudence:
This misbegotten step, that ill-timed grapple
Each wormy bite we take of rotten apple — each one marks us deep.
If harmed or just abash’d, some fuss-pot regulators’ soon at hand
To apportion reprimand. And soon thereafter to encode
In cryptic ciphers fresh directives which, thereafter, he
Inclusivia: Or she.
Regolamento: Or she — or they — abstain from explication,
But fix confusing rules in stone and thereby codify.
We know not whereof they mean: it might be stop, it might be go.
No further light forthcomes about. We imagine neither do they know.
Queen: Canst thou not obtain a ruling?
Nuncle: A worthy thought. A pretty feeling.
And ask them, while you’re there, to nail your jelly to the ceiling.
Th’official who binds his fate to instruments unfathom’d
E’en if his own, is a rare and special bird.
Regolamento: We take our bitter medicines
E’en while we let this gleaming engine stack silt up
As like a discarded hulk, half-buried in the mud at Tilbury
In that rich and loamy sod low stunted shrubs
Whose thorny limbs the squalling wind doth shriek.
We set our team with adze and axe and secateurs
They hack at growling branches who mandate
This matchèd trade, that time-stamp, some other reckoning of pedantry.
But it is a labour more riskful then rewarding.