The Frame I — Meridian

The cartographer does not lie.

He simply chooses where to place the centre of the world.

Same coastlines. Same latitudes.

Every ocean accounted for.

But Europe expands or shrinks

depending on whose hand holds the meridian.

*

Facts are faithful servants

to whoever pays their passage.

A flood is a flood —

unless you call it cleansing,

unless you call it reckoning,

unless you build your cathedral on the silt

and name the disaster a foundation.

*

Consider the prism.

Light enters singular, sovereign, certain of itself.

It exits — scattered into spectrum —

still light.

Still the same photons, same frequency, same ancient source.

But now: red.

But now: violet.

But now: the eye must choose what it is looking at.

*

Perception is not deception.

It is curation.

The museum decides which canvases survive the century.

The archive decides which voices get a box.

The headline gives the frequency —

and frequency, over time,

becomes what we call fact.

*

Silent sentences

shape the loudest arguments.

What was omitted?

What was italicised?

Whose grief received the passive voice

while power conjugated itself in active tense?

*

Same block.

Same boulevard.

Same children at the same corner,

doing what children do when no one has given them elsewhere to be.

One lens: erosion.

One lens: resilience.

The difference is not in the children.

The difference is in the distance

from which the photograph was taken.

*

This is not philosophy.

This is not abstraction.

This is the oldest instrument in the orchestra —

older than the Rhodes, older than the bass drum,

older than the first chord struck in the dark —

the frame.

Stretched before the canvas arrives.

Deciding what fits.

Deciding what bleeds off the edge

and disappears.

*

You want the truth?

The truth is a room

with many doors.

What you know about it

depends entirely

on which door let you in.

Spoken

"This music was created by DiscoPrincess — Royalty of the Night"