Peek-A-Boo Reword
A Poem by Meg Floss
INITIATING_TRANSMISSION
AUTHOR: Profit
ORIGINAL_AUTHOR: Meg FLOSS
ORIGIN: RETROGRADE.
CURRENT_LOCATION: Earth 473B.XX-YZ
STATUS: RUNNING
CLASSIFICATION: INSTITUTIONAL ROT // CAROUSEL THEORY // ACTIVE SYSTEM AUDIT//THE_MUSIC_DIDN’T_STOP
The carousel didn’t break.
We keep looking for the moment it went wrong. The pivot. The villain. The decision that cracked the thing open. We want a timestamp, we want someone to blame so we can believe there’s a version of this where the ride stays honest.
There isn’t.
The carousel kept spinning. The music kept playing. The horses kept moving in their perfect, useless circles.
The frequency just shifted.
Slowly, incrementally. The way a dial turns when no one’s watching. One degree at a time until the calliope warps into something metallic and wrong and you’re standing there thinking this doesn’t sound right, but you can’t remember what right sounded like anymore.
That’s the design.
//THE_NURSERY
The people running the system aren’t villains in the way we like our villains.
You won’t catch them twirling mustaches. No mua hahahahahaha. They’re genuinely confused by your confusion. The numbers are fine. The metrics are clean. The quarterly report reads like a success story. The fact that someone got devoured in the process is interference.
They look at the wreckage and see inefficiency. An unplanned variable. Something that disrupted the flow of a machine that was otherwise performing within acceptable parameters.
The violated sit directly behind them, breathing.
Then they ask why you’re upset about the numbers.
//THE_BLINDFOLD
We built a mythology around the image of Justice.
The scales. The blindfold. The sword. We needed to believe the blindfold meant fairness. That the person holding the scales couldn’t see who was standing in front of them so the weight of the thing in their hands was the only variable that mattered.
It was always a peek-a-boo mask.
Was the blindfold ever sacred? I believe it was simply convenient. It let the system operate without accountability, because accountability requires seeing, and seeing requires admitting what’s in front of you. Admitting what’s in front of you means the quarterly report has to include the cost of the people it doesn’t count. The scales aren’t broken because someone swung them wrong.
The wrong hands are holding them.
Different problem, different solution.
SYSTEM_LOG: CAROUSEL_AUDIT
MUSIC_STATUS: Warped. Still playing.
HORSES: Still moving.
OPERATOR_RESPONSE: Numbers are adequate.
AUDIENCE_STATUS: Notice the frequency shift.
BLINDFOLD: REMOVED
SCALES: MISASSIGNED.
ROOT_CAUSE: MISPLACEMENT.//THE_EXIT
The circus doesn’t end when the clown falls.
It ends when the audience stops clapping.
That’s the mechanism. The system runs on participation. On the belief that the people holding the scales earned the right to hold them. On the collective agreement to treat the glittering mobile like it means something, while the real cost sits just out of frame.
Walk out of the tent.
Feel the ground. Yes, the actual ground. Solid and old. Completely unimpressed by what the ticker says this morning.
The strength was in the belief we assigned to it. Never the costume.
We let it atrophy while watching the mobile spin.
The fix isn’t rage. Rage feeds the machine. Rage is loud and visible and the machine knows exactly what to do with loud and visible.
Steady hands.
Wise enough to hold the scales. Wise enough to know when holding them is the move and when to set them down.
The carousel is still spinning.
The frequency is wrong.
You can hear it now.
Wake up…. up.
That… is the audit.
//END OF TRANSMISSION | A guest post by
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Well done! What a great experience for me, thank you! (More to say later!)
I didn’t see the collab at first and was like “this is a very similar take to Meg’s poem she posted a couple of weeks ago” and then saw her there. Excellent collab, guys