The view from the panopticon

In a comic once I read
the next step might be something like
taking off your own head and putting on another
like a new cap and tilting it a new direction
called for by new situation
schizophrenia,
but in a different direction—
beaming an innerstate with white lines
streamering cords of mucus and bellyburn
meals from shitty greasespoons and roomservice
meetings where turkeys and southern gentlemen
and anglophiles undress the queen’s royal guard
and gobble down the beef till we don’t notice it
streaming down our cheeks like broken hands pouring
tears that might otherwise be pouring down cheeks
if we had courage enough or knownwhatnow to show ourselves.

Does our technostate approximate the prophecies
of a burnt comic book mind?
A Modern Postmodern Post-Person place?
Where the person is a real face in a real place
for real in your face? The cultivation of personality
at a hyperindustrial pace?

In my hyperion orbit,
even as I grope the astronomy of titaninformation
before the cold of my open window huffing winter,
should I know whom the people who birthed and died before me
were talking about when they said things like, *(following will be filled in)*
“barth quote
“grotesque
“Hell is other people
“All’s fair in

My friends and I and family?
Were they trying to talk about people and the people now
who turn on cameras to film themselves and other people
doing things like living, screaming and living crazy?

Were they talking about the things people do
before people told themselves?

Inventing cold fusion for the silent audience
of himself on a youth mantle and Muhammad Ali in photographs --
(a rolemodel and jittering adversary) a pictured image of
what could be, might have been
if not rape and insanity—in the public restroom where he filmed himself
and his polandspring litter alchemy.

Now the world may hear him speak!
And my time watches the horse’s mouth.

When the good old letters were put to pages by pen
or set to strange arrangements by the freedom of type,
were the minds behind preparing us for the truth of things
that we in our gentle positions may not yet have had to see?
For the benefit of those in proper homes:
where lunacy and heartshed and person to person intracontemplation
hide in nests of shadow
between gothic woods of southern shapes
and alongside faraway tracks where a station waits
to hold late locamotives to task?
Hiding like sideshow after sideshow showed
Crying like lost brothers when those called brothers go home
Grotesque when grotesque is too foreign a word

What did they know I don’t?
Did they know what my hyperion station would bring
as it belts around my time and rings?

From a balcony I watch a blond haired boy try to bellow
with all the might his young neck could, it not coming
more than wounded screams. I watch from my balcony
on a balcony through the eyes of a telephone and I hear
a disconnected excoriation of laughter that coincides
with my own disconnected hoots and I hear the muttering
of a third party in the company of the conduit
but am unable to decipher her interpretations.
The young blonde is bleeding down his face
and the scene is a flurry of skull printed sweatshirts
and peacoats and branded swinging sweatshirts
being thrown down by angry participants
who decide that maybe a fight is not the way
and tears alone are more insulting than another punch to the face,
then dissipate, then the blonde and a faithful idiot descend
towards midnight streets where only bicycles still ride
to blow off steam—the idiot accompanies to do what is right,
to calm the blonde say it’s all right.

And have I been there before?
I’m sure
I’ve been somewhere nearby
the blood in his eyes,
the madness in his words and on the same world
that swallows him up and folds him up inside
the head that finds these things important at that time.

And if I weren’t I could say
that for that night at least,
I saw the same things he did
and I saw the same things the nameless balcony did
that we all stood on and watched from through
the electric eye in the hand on some funny guy
who recorded the show and put it to music like it were a show
so myself and countless others
could unscrew our heads and put on another
so we, for those few interspective minutes,
were one
watching him, a nameless character in simple story
acting out the history of literature
beneath a balcony
into the camera of a mobile phone
behind a plate of image and sound
alone in my bedroom
before bed.