Counterintelligence

What proves what we don’t know we don’t know.
What bends back to examine its own bending-back-on.

What sucks the milk of meaning from each plump word:
to assess, then return it—no threat detected.

What love your credit covers, and what hate.
What counts the same ten on pairs of soft and weathered hands.

What cuts the strings of the sense organs’ puppetry—
for efficiency’s sake. No silence to hear; none at all.

What need? What need? What need? What need? What need?
I can’t know what was done to me. My pupils blistered

in the void house, raided by light, and I discarded everything
I could not defend. Atomically no difference exists

between a thing believed and a thing spared questioning.
I didn’t want to die. I wanted to be practical.