The Bureaucrat’s Apprentice

After Goethe’s Der Zauberlehrling (1797)

I.
The old masters have retired now,
gone to their pensions and their gin –
and I, their eager understudy,
have let the paperwork begin.
I’ve watched them stamp and file and countersign,
I’ve learned the forms, the codes, the rubric line –
the spell is mine.

II.
Rise up, you directives and guidelines!
Rise up, you circulars and briefs!
You sat so long in filing cabinets,
now march — and multiply like thieves.
Each policy shall spawn a sub-policy,
each sub-clause breed its own bureaucracy –
proliferate for me.

III.
Go, memo! Draft the consultation draft
of the draft framework for review.
Convene the steering group to plan the group
that plans what steering groups should do.
A task force formed to scope the task force’s brief,
a working group to grant the working group relief –
more rope, more rope.

IV.
How well the process flows!
The inbox fills, the inbox grows.
Every form requires a form
to certify the form was filled.
Every rule requires a rule
to govern how the rule’s instilled –
the system breathes and breeds
and no one leads.

V.
The people wait at counters, numbered, pale.
They’ve brought their evidence, their pleas, their grief.
We cannot help them till the system’s checked
for proper protocol – belief
in democratic voice, in civic right,
can wait for clearance, wait for oversight –
till further light.

VI.
Now something’s wrong – I sense it –
the forms have formed their own committees.
The process owns the process now:
it serves itself, not cities.
What I called up to serve the public good
now serves itself, as I always knew it would –
misunderstood.

VII.
Stop, you endless requisitions!
Stop, you self-referential codes!
The citizens I swore to represent
are buried under your commode.
The ballot box stands empty in the hall,
the parliament’s a rubber stamp for all
your protocol.

VIII.
Accountability? A form for that –
in triplicate, submitted, lost.
Transparency? A portal, password-locked,
the audit buried in its cost.
Democracy needs more than ritual words:
it needs a state that answers when it’s heard –
not just deferred.

IX.
The old master won’t return –
he’s billing someone else by the hour.
The spell I cast has eaten through the floor;
what I called governance, called power,
is process eating process, rule on rule,
the public interest fed into the tool
of fools.

X.
So here we stand amid the wreckage-forms,
the stamped and filed and duly noted dead,
where once a republic breathed and argued loud
now only process speaks instead.
Not tyranny by boot – by procedure’s weight –
democracy that bored itself to its own fate.
The brooms won’t stop. The masters won’t come back.
We did this, friends.
Tick the box for that.

© Bakchos, May 2026

BLAK AND BLACK  |  MEDIA AND ADVOCACY  |  EST. 2010