ABOUT THE POEM: Bureaucracy in a Good Girl’s Relations is a reflective free-verse poem examining how intimacy can be managed, delayed, and justified through social performance rather than emotional continuity. Framed through the extended metaphor of administrative procedure-queues, files, desks, stamps-the poem critiques a specific form of relational behavior in which desire is not denied but scheduled, deferred, and strategically allocated. The speaker observes a hierarchy that governs access, not merely to a person, but to legitimacy: who may approach without damaging reputation, who must wait, and who is silently disqualified. The poem situates this hierarchy within a college setting, where emotional availability is masked as moral discipline, and multiple attachments are maintained simultaneously under the guise of propriety. Rather than accusing outright betrayal, the poem interrogates the logic behind it. Love, here, is not impulsive or sincere but processed-managed like paperwork, cleared when convenient, delayed when status shifts. The speaker’s absence becomes a bureaucratic fault rather than an emotional rupture, revealing how proximity and visibility override depth and continuity. At its core, the poem challenges the idea of “goodness” as a public performance. It argues that moral identity, when constantly displayed and defended, often replaces emotional responsibility. The final turn rejects the administrative model of love entirely, asserting that genuine connection does not require queues, tokens, or justification-it recognizes itself quietly, without spectacle. This is not a rejection of boundaries or choice, but of emotional opportunism disguised as virtue.

Title – Bureaucracy in a Good Girl’s Relations

The hierarchy governing who may approach a “good girl”
without staining her image is ruthlessly ordered:
father first,
then elder brother,
younger brother,
cousins,
best friend,
boyfriend,
casual friends,
and finally the suitors-
ranked by looks, money, and utility.

This is the same girl
who once clawed-unstoppable-
toward my pants.

One day, my college best friend mentioned, almost casually,
that three men had already proposed to her.
It was not gossip.
It was a status update.

She was informing me
that I had slipped to fourth in line.

My crime was simple:
disappearing for two months
due to attendance detention.
Out of sight.
Out of priority.

In plain language, she was saying:
“I do not date a man
who lowers his own status
and then waits in a queue.”

That is exactly what happened.

Two years later-
after the three I assumed were ahead of me
had graduated and vanished,
leaving no pending files-
she finally stepped into my path and asked,
not with desire, but procedure,
more a desk calling a file
than a woman calling a man:
“Hey, why don’t you talk to me anymore?”

I did not stop walking.
She did not ask twice.

In college, she had juggled all of them at once,
each “special friend” kept
in blissful ignorance
of who held temporary clearance that week.

Whenever needed,
she discovered faults in the paperwork-
a missing stamp,
an invented delay-
just enough to clear the desk
for the next applicant.

I sometimes think of the men
who must have been asking her to be their girlfriend
at the very moment she came to speak to me.
When would they be attended?
By then, the queue must have crossed the street
outside the registrar’s office.

Pure bureaucracy.

She is the prime minister
of her own small democracy,
dispensing intimacy
one numbered token at a time.

“This is order,” she signals.
“Wait your turn.
Do not create anarchy.”

But the heart already knows
when it is good.
There is no need to perform goodness
for witnesses.

She was not good, my friend.
If she were,
she would not treat love
as an administrative process
instead of emotional continuity.

I have no shame for refusing to acknowledge
that the prime minister also fears
anarchy in her own heart.

She continues to act as her father expects,
as society rewards,
as desire and habit instruct.
Choice, in such a system, feels voluntary
only while power is borrowed.

She will not ask why she chose what she chose,
or which part of her was obeying whom,
until time places her at the very top of the tree-
in old age, without a husband or companion,
when beauty is no longer currency
and approval no longer protection.

Then one day she will think:
I am like Ronie Dinosaur now.

Only then, with no queue behind her
and no office left to manage,
will thought arrive-
late, unpaid, and unavoidable.