Panopticon

2 Minutes Read Time

Concentric circles on wood — Photo by Pim de Boer on Unsplash

             yes	            colossus of a hundred eyes	             overseer
of the universal other	           I live for others’ living   yes	                     yes
              & I die deaths of others’ dying	        misdeeds 
allotments & debts accruances’ worth apportioned
             to measure’s gain	             yes I am bound in expromission

indentured	      myself to the other’s due/ the other’s release 
               mine & within my borders/ vulgar topographer/ stacked
below these decks	    under these shelves the impenitent 
               confide to me in whispers of captivity of spiritings
of shipped out & disembarked	         of dominion’s divide

               serfs & masters forever twained	        die cast
neutered & archived simultaneously        bridle	                   your tongue
                          or salvaged as public spectacle as light 
            playing as eons rising & tumbling as water
transformed to vapor climbs or fluid	                    slides over

shores & stones bottle caps last summer’s
               flip-flops	  & yes I am all that glitters 
substantiate or slinks abject    yes	   as well the scratching
              at your sills in shifts & starless taken & tamed
my dog good dog I am the watching & the warehoused watched

the all-seeing as well the shifting hues/ the altered 
             peaks in heat & cold I’m Darwin reporting in on
continuity & striving doubts & lamentations returned to
            homeland rocks to five-fingered raccoons to baboons
I’m the atavist’s haunt the vigilante’s gist/ cobalt’s range
 
        increase or surfeit boarding ship eighteen young Negresses 
trussed below	        what names were they called	               what
                                                      did they call	                each another 
               & against the stench the captain’s borrowed sachet
under my nose I am guide to the penitents’ hours the station

              warden in the central rotunda the statistician of false 
profits/ as ever rich is always preferable to poor/ all cells visible
              from here yes I am lifer & guard conscience & no
                          regard	             quotidian’s burnisher of dulled 
              surfaces of the isolate likewise versicolor’s phylogenetic

              profiler	               mass incarceration’s	               actuarial 
disremembered or recalled or redressed or altered per
              CCTV order/ tactic/ yes I	        we surveiller/ surveillance
& surveilled in cahoots & yes I am/ we are	 yes	        in this
              uneasily acquiescent victims	                of our own	                        convictions

Mara Adamitz Scrupe

is the author of BEAST, awarded the 2014 Stevens Manuscript Prize (NFSPS Press, 2014), and Sky Pilot (a chapbook, Finishing Line Press, 2012). Her collection Magnalia was a winner in the 2017 Eyewear Press Lorgnette Chapbook Prize competition and is set for release in early 2018. Her poems have appeared in Bare Fiction, Comstock Review, Off The Coast, Narrative, Crosswinds Poetry Journal, Crab Creek Review, and Sentinel Literary Quarterly Review. She has won or been short-listed for the Ron Pretty Poetry Prize (Australia), Aesthetica Creative Writing Award (UK), University of Canberra Vice-Chancellor’s International Poetry Prize (Australia), and the National Poetry Competition (UK).

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Mara Adamitz Scrupe

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