Control Grows from The Panopticon by Melissa Finn

The ironic power of the watchtower
Is that it has no need for power
Its power makes the prisoner a scrutiny adapter
Empowering all, to the elite's cynicism shoulder

There is no obligation to be free thinking
Guards distant, broken scowls require counselling
One feels the presence of a stalker obsessing
Existence is not fulfilled by line-toe living

In this system, the Eye is the spymaster and creditor
Promissory notes with no end dates lack co-signers
In debt for crimes not committed or intended
Guilty by default for the system's crimes, on them exacted

To the state, any human relation of the system
The prisoner, watcher to the watched
Is a form of sadomasochism, pain-ed
State gaze is force persecution of the inquisitioned

Panopticon tries to crush its object into alienation
Made radical. Omnipotence so egotistical
Will of the Fact-Stretcher is maniacal
Encouraging a passive form of life cessation

The distance of the eye
The proximity of the eye
Confounds the presence of the eye
That is in the Periphery and Center

It wills to wound, exhaust, and hound
Humanity and a generosity of a people disavowed
They are degraded, says Nietzsche
Until they are nothing yet lampooned

Mistrust aficionado
Mistrust aficionado
Mistrust aficionado
Control grows like a weed
Gaze of your robots follows a creed
They can’t breathe
They can’t breathe
They can’t breathe

As Lewental’s writings
Buried at a crematorium in Auschwitz say
The truth of the violence is more atrocious
More tragic
Than words of mortals can convey
K.K.K.

For the pain of never-ending negation
That leads to the deleting of a people
Is capable of burning every word and inspiration
And leaving muteness
The only language that is speak-able

In this silence, our power ushers forth
Pluck the seeds and the weeds of oppression
From the garden of the sovereign
Let’s have a conversation with our shadows
The dark side of the forces of our conscious
Own what lies under our creeping vines
Give them some time to speak
Talk to them
And then adopt their perspective
When they lose their control
Peace and imagination have room to flow

Refusal and resistance
Grounded reclamation
Planting to uproot
Through repetitive iterations of persuasion

Transformation arises from the first and last drop of fortitude
In a people who may have no other option, slinging a new attitude
An aptitude built in solitude and magnitude
Out of the space
Of the hurt and wound

Knowledge of Self/Other that are unifiable
Of the limits of what is no longer tolerable
When there is nothing left but the infinite
At the bottom of the dispossessed’s barrel

If death is in constant abeyance
If it hovers and has no gravity
There is still life to be lived
Capable of being defended

In the attempted erasure of the living
There is always out-of-womb birthing

It is as Fichte suggests
In those moments
Thrown in the orbit of their alienation
When the sheer distance of life to itself
Has reached its limit
Its apogee
The zenith of its trajectory

Like the Earth in its path
Around the Sun that burns fiercely

We find that life boomerangs back
From where it emerged softly

Mistrust aficionado
Mistrust aficionado
Mistrust aficionado
Control grows like a weed
Gaze of your robots follows a creed
They can’t breathe
They can’t breathe
They can’t breathe

• Spoken Word
• philosophical
• political poetry
• spoken word poetry
• Waterloo