The Strings We Cannot See

I — Enchantment

We drift through our days like lanterns set afloat,
believing the water’s current is our own desire,
though the river bends only where unseen hands
have taught it to curve.

II

The world hums with invisible scaffolding,
and we mistake its rigid lattice for the freedom of open air,
climbing because the rungs are there,
not because we chose the ascent.

III

Religion threads its silks through our marrow,
weaving cathedral shadows into our thoughts
until we confuse the echo of a sermon
with the pulse of our own longing.

IV

Greed grows in us like a second skeleton,
a secret architecture that props up our desires,
bending our posture toward whatever shines,
even when the shine is merely a reflection of our own emptiness.

V

Our unexamined thoughts lie dormant
like seeds in drought-stricken soil,
waiting for any stray rainfall of rhetoric
to bloom into belief, no matter how poisonous the blossom.

VI

We move through the world like marionettes carved from fog,
shaped by hands we never see,
our boundaries dissolving
whenever a new master exhales command.

VII

We mistake momentum for will,
the way a leaf attributes its spinning fall to choice,
unaware that it was lifted and dropped
by winds indifferent to its form.

VIII — Rupture

Yet there are brief moments—
a shiver in the joints, a hesitation in the pull—
when the strings slacken just enough
for us to glimpse the machinery,
cold and intricate, humming our names.

IX

And in that hesitation something shifts:
not freedom exactly, but the memory of it,
a ghost-sensation in the hand
that has never held the rope.

X

Every promise whispered by power
is a script slid under our doors at dawn,
the ink still wet,
inviting us to perform the role written
for the version of ourselves we never questioned.

XI — Aftermath

And in that flicker of clarity,
fragile as a candle in a cathedral’s hollow breath,
we lit it.
We believed we lit it.
The flame was real.

by Bakchos