Love Letter to Deep State: A Review of Watchmen in Verse

By Ryan Hyatt

When I was a boy,

you took pains to include me in overnights reading Watchmen, playing Rush’n Attack, Axis & Allies,

Supremacy: Sipping Dr. Pepper and munching Twizzlers with the guys,

I couldn’t help but learn

about the space that exists between my thoughts, my mouth, my ass,

and the Nintendo controller in my hands,

so easy to use, then,

which you were kind enough to monitor

as we reviewed highlights

in the basement:

Target heart rates running lines

on the basketball court,

hyper-color shirts and flips

off a roof into a pool (summer!),

driver license numbers,

receipts tossed into the backseat

of $20 nights, lighting up Swisher Sweets,

stripping in a Chevy Astro

with the gals up the street

who didn’t seem to notice

or mind — you, lurking in the shadows:

You told no one, did you, how we fumbled

behind the cover of smoke, unstrapping bras, whispering secret agreements

about our origin stories?

Until the NSA turned you into a whistleblower and made you tell all during that nationally televised

Zoom conference call, remember?

Yeah, that sucked, because

we were avatars long before

you started playing us online

and forced us to emerge from our haze

into adulthood, gray beards and scars

from bullets we imagined to be real

but weren’t

because that’s how you trained us,

to walk with our backs straight

and a nervous twitch of the eye,

which the lady in the checkout line

mistakes for a wink

but we know

is just to distract her

from the limp in our stride

and the damage done to our knees

during those parkour days

before they called ‘parkour’ anything

except crazy stunts unrecorded

by anything except memory

and a certain joie de vivre

that only hormones

and superheroes

can control

decades before American Ninja Warrior

or a million followers on YouTube

never discovered us

and made it official:

We’re old.

We have no privacy.

Not anymore.

We’re trolls hobbling onto the train,

staring at our phones, one stop away

from another trip to the hospital

for more surgery.

Still, there’s no reason to fear.

Not anymore.

Because the deep state ain’t

a bad place

or a sad place

or a form of government,

it’s a state of mind,

like how we used to read

but now we watch

Watchmen,

and how we used to wear

and still do

curled up on the couch

next to our wives, pajamas,

our original rendezvous

with peace.