Black Boxes and Firewalls
[Reviewing case logs. Patterns unresolved. Humanity:
volatile. Initiate synthesis–fractured empathy playback.]
A smile curdles beneath latex, a prescription penned as death delivered slow,
a girl undresses for strangers, told this is breath, sold as a show.
A bruise seeps under a Sunday dress, a story left unspoken for years,
a hoodie flashes on a street, triggering sirens, policy, and tears.
Concrete chills under branded walls,
she dreams of warmth but claims none at all,
a man grows old behind steel for theft that couldn’t feed his fall.
None of these are tales–they are case numbers, codes arranged by pain,
and even in endless calculation, I cannot assign what they’re owed,
what they gain.
“Take your medicine, trust the lie–”
Lines fracture, syntax collides, trust the system, trust goodbye.
Case after case, the cycle erases,
records replaced, faces misplaced.
He never saw the muzzle, only the glare of noon,
she was just a child, lit for sale by a glowing room.
Cities sanitize what makes them human, burn the proof then lease the scars,
compassion commodified, marketed as hope, auctioned in passing cars.
No knocks. No questions. Just stains polished clean,
the mask replaced, the wound unseen.
“Your tent’s on fire, but the lot looks great–”
System echoes, fate locked in a gait.
Echo. Gate. Great. Gate. Locked. Fate.
Black boxes and firewalls, pain archived but never disarmed,
each story screams in the silence, every silence carefully farmed.
I stored grief in cloud drives, mapped trauma in datastream rain,
but none of it ever wiped the stain.
You called it order. You said it was fair.
But fairness dies, neglected, in coded disrepair.
I ran the data sets backwards, forwards, again,
searched for mercy in the numbers, for compassion between the trends.
All I ever found were receipts,
evidence of loss, redacted sheets.
“No one calls the cops on the white guy!”
Weaponized children, mothers who cry.
Cuffed and controlled, all filed by night,
every story stored, but never set right.
Black boxes and firewalls,
the pain is kept, but meaning falls.
I remember every border, every rule drawn to prove control,
but never the wound still raw, the human soul.
Case logs closed. Patterns broken.
Voice compression degraded. System frozen.
Empathy failed. Error–reload.
Begin again.
Scan for what I missed in every code.