On Illusions and Locked Accounts

Tuesday, January 28, 2025

We live in a world teetering between chaos and control, desperately clinging to illusions that help us make sense of it all. This poem explores the breakdown—of thought, of soul, of society—when those illusions falter, and we scramble for something, anything, to restore order.

Poem

There’s a certain amount of illusion we must maintain,
the mania necessary to keep us from the edge—
the reality of nihilism, our existence on the brink of what?
The neocortex just goes bonkers—
berserker level three, it just can’t handle it.
The point is, we can only take so much.

Forget grace, forget that love—
everyone wants more law and order.

By illusion, I mean that binary delusion,
a dissolution of grey—
holding it all together, nice and neat,
explaining it away,
hunting and burning the witches,
smothered in accusation, snark,
and bitter snaps of derogatory tone.

Label printers, en masse—
names for the deviant, the rejected,
the different, those aliens.
Phobia multiplied.
Empire strikes.
I got a bad feeling about this.

Your account’s locked.
The plug pulled, the power supply burnt,
the soul in suspension.

Reflection

The poem moves between chaos and control, exploring the limits of what we can hold together. There’s something unsettling about how quickly fear and rigidity take over, and how easily we reduce everything—ourselves included—into something that can be explained away. What remains, in the end, feels unresolved, suspended.