The Spy

Volumnious files

sit like beige paper clams

with diaphanous veils of paper

that are

soft tissues gaping from within

upwards

into their filing cabinet prison

waiting to be released into the sea of florescent air



where some little bastard

in government tweed and tiny round glasses

and tight little lips under his prim moustache

can sift through your life and mind

(although now all of this is in silicone and electrons, you understand...)

and mine

and look at our pages and run his gaze across them

the way someone from an older clan

probably looked across a valley at us and decided

if we were harmful or not



but now

you and I

our pages sifted together

instead of introductions around a bonfire

we glow on a monitor

we've been databased

our zeros and ones encoded in ASCII slashes

like tribal marks across our faces

your hair is too pink and my ear ring too bold



and maybe the little man's eyebrow jots up a notch

almost like an emotion

as a shard of light glints off his glass lens

and a bead of sweat drops off his upper lip

like a wizard standing with a piece of broken glass above children's genitals

making them grow up

and act like men and women, instead of little boys and girls



And so the little man might smirk

because he's doing it for our own good

cutting us down to size in his underground cavern of faxes and glowing boxes

so he can feed our sheets into new, beige clams

and feed us into greygreen steel boxes that slide shut with a snap

and hold us in the embrace of this Fine New World we find ourselves enveloped in the

next time we try to get onto an aeroplane

and get a surprise at the gate



The Turning of the Worms