Redacted

The report exists. We know it exists.

It has a number and a date.

Nine hundred pages of the truth

and eleven of them released.

The rest is a black rectangle,

which is a kind of sentence too:

you may know that you're not knowing.

That's the part they let you have.

And the gaps aren't gaps. The gaps are architecture.

Somebody chose the shape of them —

Redacted! (redacted!)

Everything that mattered's under black.

Redacted! (redacted!)

And you're expected to relax.

Trust us, it's for your protection —

protection from the sentence, not the harm.

Redacted. (redacted)

Thirty years in a box, then they let it out slow,

turns out the threat to the nation was a résumé — no

soldier, no city, no secret in the sheet,

just a man who didn't fancy how the record read him back.

Half those bars are protecting a career.

Not a border. Not a life. Not a soul out here.

And we argued twenty years on the fragments we were fed —

you can win any argument if you write it and shred it.

So the question isn't what's inside.

It's who gets to decide the black —

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An empty page can rule a country.

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You'll argue over what you're given.

That's the whole design of it —

they don't need the lie if they can hold the file.

Redacted. (redacted)

...

What's under there?

...

What's under there?

REDACTED! (redacted!)

OPEN IT! OPEN IT! OPEN IT!

NOT BECAUSE WE'LL LIKE IT —

BECAUSE IT'S OURS!

Redacted. (redacted)

Every empty rectangle

was paid for out of our lives.

Unseal it.