What is the All-Seeing Eye
Do you think it's real?
They said it was for peace,
a wire under your skin,
your laugh in a data vault,
your scream — timestamped and indexed.
They called it security,
but it had the stink of war.
We fed the All-Seeing Eye
with our faces,
our flaws,
our petty searches
“how to love,”
“how to lie,”
“how to disappear without dying.”
It watched.
It blinked never.
We are metadata ghosts,
grief tagged in 4K,
crying in front of smart TVs
that whisper back at night.
Our cameras smile when we don’t.
Our phones know before we do.
The walls listen
not metaphorically.
The bricks have ears
and the sky is bugged.
Satellites trace our hearts
like fragile heat signatures.
Love becomes a red dot.
Desire = anomaly.
Snowden wasn’t a leak
he was a scream.
A fracture.
He tore the veil and found code.
PRISM, XKeyscore , TripWire
not names,
but wounds.
This is not fiction.
China grades its citizens.
The West sells fear in high-def.
Your guilt is presumed,
your innocence archived,
your freedom
licensed, leased, denied.
What are we when every silence
has a transcript?
What are we
when eyes without lashes
watch us sleep?
A body of flesh,
tagged by code,
chained to clouds that never rain.
Encrypt your breath.
Whisper in analog.
Paint your truth on cave walls.
Rebel with rotten passwords.
Burn your SIM in holy fire.
Give them nothing but static,
nothing but noise,
because
data doesn’t bleed.
Copyright Malcolm Gladwin
May 2025