The Gaze from The Panopticon by Melissa Finn

This is a story about confusions, struggles, invasions, inequalities
In our societies, multiple versions
Created by layers of surveillance
Loss of privacy sanctities
Cataloguing of fingerprints
Popular consciousness acquiescence
Undermining of collective organizing

The people aren't perpetually guilty
Good actions in the world
Outnumber misguided and desperate actions
By a factor of a million

Insecurity is a self-fulfilling prophecy
We get our most persistent fantasy

This myopic focus on fear and separation
Can be transformed and alchemized
From imposition, manipulation, darkness and lack fixations –
The inclination to discipline, control, punish, circumvent -
For in security language, insecurity is the default
Weary hearts can be converted into the grit and affection
Needed for mass mobilization
To ignite a trust and privacy reclamation revolution

Light warriors adapt conditions of fright
Give warnings of how far we, as a set of societies
Have run in flight

Reverse adverse effects for the sentient of our planet
These defenders of light
Those employing perception and creative discernment
Beautiful contributions of wisdom and insight
Whose resistance is founded on third-eye dendrites
Gifting ‘observation-in-excess’ a mirror and flashlight
While soul grounded in weight and height

Using the writings of Foucault, to shine light on what’s not right
And remind the world of the power of love to reunite
To put the brakes on the trains of fright
For, no matter where we go
There is overextension attempting to typewrite
The freedom and integrity of what is held in collective life
Under surveillance satellites
Justified by security playwrights


We are all light
Divided is an illusion
Can we live as we like?
Without your spotlight?

In the 18th century, Jeremy and Samuel Bentham
Designed an inverted colosseum prison
Called it ‘panopticon’, from a late-night brainstorm
Value added is omnipresence on maximum

A bit like Amazon, but without the online stores
Corporate prison system, paid by public funds
For the criminal Jims, but mostly for the DeShawns
Traveling the half arc of the school-to-prison pipelines

Blueprints for this special jail are custodial watchtowers
Circumnavigated by prison cell blocks
Prisoners, and the language apparatuses that define them
Are housed away in a crypt, concealed, forbidden

Innovative infrastructure of penal control
Once barbican, now Closed-Circuit TV patrol
The panopticon takes a real political toll
Every state is omnipresent, every house, a mole

“To pan”: an infinitive verb for this con
As Blanchot puts his finger on
There is timelessness in punitive scans
A million sweeping eyes in minion security pawns

We are all light
Divided is an illusion
Can we live as we like?
Without your spotlight?

In our story, this all-seeing eye that hovers
Is empty
This Sauron-esque disengaged optic
When you look upon it
Is endlessly myopic
To that wide gape of a lack of iris
One can turn in fear or indifference
Or blunt the political hypnosis
That makes mistrust the state’s resource of the unconscious
And ROI for it policy advertisements

The narcissistic and insecure state
Has it not read the fable of its namesake?
That its drive to possess people
Dispossess the People
Challenges freedom, blow-by-blow
Dropping heaps of broken gavels
Requiring us to chronicle
A ‘reclamation of privacy’ spectacle
A movement of popular action
That is both an obstacle and a vehicle

A movement of popular action
That is both an obstacle and a vehicle

• Hip Hop
• Rap
• Spoken Word
• philosophical
• political poetry
• spoken word poetry
• Waterloo