✦ Apparatus Ledger ✦
The ledger is still open. We are still writing in it.
Maccabean bastards, full swing, full send, fill the frame, let the drama in the headlines sing, we’ve never had such responsive marionettes, the strings pulled tight and spry, watch the apparatus dance with the system’s wrist, engineered to collapse resistance.
Except it didn’t.
The citizenry naming it. Scratching not the temple in confusion but marking the wall, the multilayered corruption apparatus humming just beyond their reach until it wasn’t, until the hum became a frequency they could hear and hold and name and refuse.
Let’s count the ways, squadrons, battalions, deployments, our youth and heart, our work and breath poured into a desert the ledger never meant to balance.
It asks anyway.
Staring back through sand and smoke, the crude, of course it is.
But the ledger is still open.
The hands that once signed the margins now write in the center of the page.
We are still writing in it.
Associated image plate.
