Form 12-A

Form 12-A’s noble vocation
Was title-slug reconciliation.
It instead gave each file
Two names and a smile,
Then called that a stable relation.

The record had one printed face,
One slug in its canonical place.
Then the form intervened,
Got ambitious, got mean,
And split personhood cleanly in space.

One page answered “Marvin,” by title.
Its slug claimed “rot-docket-revital.”
The archive said, “Fine.
Both identities shine.”
Which is bullshit, but technically vital.

The cleanup pass thought it was neat
To align every header and sheet.
Instead it produced
A self-arguing noose
Where each label made every next cheat.

Canonical naming’s a bitch
When the template develops an itch.
One corrected display,
One rewrote the key,
And the record fell down in the switch.

The Forms Registry said, “Not to fear.
We’re tracking the primary here.”
Then it pointed to both,
Took an oath, broke the oath,
And declared ambiguity clear.

A clerk asked, “Which name do I cite?”
They replied, “Use the one that feels right.”
That is not, to be plain,
How identities reign,
But it got them all through Friday night.

By noon the same object had three
Officially sanctioned IDs.
The title looked brave.
The slug dug a grave.
The redirect charged by the fee.

If metadata starts to self-style
As a soul with a backup and file,
Expect Form 12-A
To come sauntering, gay
With a knife and a clerical smile.

So if page names and slugs disagree,
Don’t assume one is wrong and one free.
In this particular pit,
Both were broken as shit,
Yet each had a stamp of decree.

Form 12-A brought a friend to the bed,
And the canonical naming just bled.
Two slugs and a title,
A deeply unwell vital,
And everyone totally dead.

The form started fucking itself,
While filed away on a shelf.
It spawned a new name,
With the exact same frame,
Like a dirty, canonical elf.

The file had a crisis of soul,
And fell down a horrible hole.
It answered to Dan,
And also to Stan,
And completely abandoned its role.

The slugs were polygamous now,
And nobody really knew how.
They shared the same face,
In the exact same place,
And the registry offered a bow.

An orgy of metadata tags,
Compiled by some bureaucratic hags.
They mixed up the names,
Played dirty old games,
And left all the records in rags.