Samuel Posten
All that is needed, then, is to place a supervisor in a central tower and to shut up in each cell a madman, a patient, a condemned man, a worker or a schoolboy. By the effect of backlighting, one can observe from the tower, standing out precisely against the light, the small captive shadows in the cells of the periphery.
—Paul-Michel Foucault
He sits in the center
of the panopticon.
He’s the controller,
wielding vision,
no land unseen.
He has hundreds
of contacts:
faces,
numbers,
points
on a machine.
He has their burdens,
pooled from all.
Their joys are
his sadness,
snapshots
of other lives
he cannot have.
He may seem the prison guard
for he resides
in the center.
Rather,
he is the prisoner.
On every TV screen,
users have,
a picture of his face pops up.
They seem to be on the perimeter.
Each sends a quick hello
Before departing
To their frozen, fascinating lives.
The man
Watches
From his crystal tower,
Inundated
With faces.
He sits,
Absorbing all his surroundings,
Hoping that one day,
He can live all their lives,
That they are his own:
his pleasurable mythology.
Samuel Posten is an aspiring poet and philosopher born in Plano, Texas. He currently attends St. Mark’s School of Texas. Despite his unrequited love for science fiction and dystopian novels, he has instead chosen to focus on nature and society to invoke catharsis in himself and his readers. When not living vicariously through poetry, he enjoys reading, running and going to dinner with his friends.
Willey Reveley (1760–1799) was an 18th-century English architect trained at the Royal Academy Schools. About 1791 he received his first professional fee as an architect, £10, for assisting philosopher Jeremy Bentham in preparing architectural drawings for Bentham's scheme for a Panopticon prison. Reveley continued to work on the project with Bentham for the rest of the 1790s.
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