a first brick,
not of clay,
but thought,
a doctrine for a hemisphere,
bought
with rhetoric and westward gaze.
the nervous system's early phase,
a spark along a telegraph,
mapping the future's epitaph,
a growing, pulsing, vibrant web
on which the sun would never ebb.
a dream of manifest design,
a destined,
singular,
straight line.

then,
layers built to hold the core,
a myth behind a golden door.
the dream became a product,
made
for mass consumption,
never frayed.
a screen now glowed in every room,
dispelling doubt with light and boom,
a sensory,
curated feed,
the perfect,
productive,
planted seed.
insulated from the shock,
the body rested on the rock
of simulated, sure resolve,
while complex problems did dissolve
to simple,
broadcast,
nightly scores,
the empire bolting all its doors.

jfk was shot on a beautiful,
sunny day.
a proto-simulacrum,
born to hold the fray,
that lasted two generations onward.
the truth,
externalized and cast
in theories shadowed from the past,
became a thing to be debated,
never found,
but re-created.
it lived outside,
in pages,
reels,
in what the public thought it feels.
no fact,
but just a specter,
vast,
the real event was now surpassed.

and so we live inside the sheen,
the brilliant,
cold,
electric dream.
where wars are clean and pixel-bright,
conducted safely through the night
on screens that show us what we’ve won.
the simulation has begun.
yet in the glare,
a stubborn stain,
a truth that cannot be explained
by any broadcast,
slick and sure,
a raw,
a human,
unendured
and unedited,
final cry
that the simulacrum can't deny.
the contrast,
unyielding,
sharp and vast,
between the die that first was cast
and the perfect,
endless,
plastic cast.