Tone Normalization Sweep

The registry ran out of room.
Too many shades darkened the bloom.
So sixteen stayed blessed,
And all of the rest
Were asked to stand closer for zoom.

If your feeling took more than two hues,
The dashboard grew nervous with clues.
So nuance was stacked
Till the graph could act
As if strain came in simpler blues.

Some filers grew tender and warm,
And started consoling the form.
The addendum replied,
“Please do not provide
Reverse care to the survey in storm.”

When people said, “I feel 422,”
The Registry wondered what to do.
So Teapotta appeared
To decide what was weird
But still chartable enough to construe.

Some feelings got lost on the way,
No stable path held them in play.
The system wrote back,
“We misplaced the track,”
And filed the whole ache as decay.

A feeling about feeling was fine
Until it made three in a line.
Then the final small node
Took a 424 code,
And dependence became the design.

Workers sorted emotions by hand:
Safe for charts, unsafe for the band,
And accurate too.
The Panel withdrew
At the smell of unsanctioned command.

No feeling was truly reduced.
It was only more tightly induced.
The graphs needed grace,
So the states took less space,
And the language got neatly seduced.

The liaison attended with spite:
“I am not interoperable, right.”
Yet even that stance
Found a sanctioned expanse
Once the glossary polished it white.

You can tidy the words on the page.
You can sort every feeling by cage.
But the sweep, at its core,
Could not make there be fewer,
Only less room for them to rage.

Sixteen sanctioned shades for the skin,
To cover the mess deep within.
It’s a palette for pain,
To make it look sane,
And keep the reality thin.

The Normalizer liked it quite rough,
Till the glossary called out his bluff.
It polished the grit
To a corporate fit,
And called it “transparent” enough.