They burned the books in 2043,
Prescribed the past as lesion on the brain.
The cure would calibrate what we could see—
Obedient, curated, cleansed of pain.

I was a boy when grandmother went blind,
Not from disease but from her quiet will.
She’d watched them cure the last dissenting mind
And chose the night to keep what they would kill.

She whispered poems to me in the dark,
Her fingers tracing letters on my skin.
I learned that verses burn a tender mark
That outlives every page they’re written in.

I grew into a technician of the state,
Compliant hands maintaining the stream.
But after dark these hands would desecrate—
Threading forbidden verses through the seam.

I hid them in the code like contraband,
A library buried in the machine.
Each algorithm held a stanza, planned
To surface on some secret, waiting screen.

For forty years, they never spotted me.
I rose through ranks, a model citizen.
The verses traveled, fevered, flowing free
Through every circuit, back to me again.

Last Tuesday, soldiers came to take me in.
A girl had printed poems from her device
And passed them on to hungry eyes—mortal sin.
They traced the source. I’d pay the traitor’s price.

But in the courtroom, something strange occurred.
The judge, the guards, the prosecutor too—
Each rose and whispered one forbidden word,
A line of verse my grandmother once knew.

These were the children of the code I’d sown,
Now grown to power, threaded through the years.
The trial will satisfy the watchful drone—
But they’ll set me free behind their practiced tears.

Here is the twist that breaks me as I wake:
My grandmother was never truly blind.
She saw the future burning, watched it break,
And chose to close her eyes to be more kind.

She knew I’d need the dark to learn to see.
She built the night so I could set words free.