Meta-thesis: The structure remains. What we do within it does not. Architecture survives belief; no one escapes the form they inhabit.

Hallucinations is arranged as an architectural argument. It moves through eight galleries, each governed by its own pressure system. The sequence is structural rather than thematic: installation, distance, obligation, rhetoric, vision, system, mythic substrate, and precedent. Each chamber reframes the one before it. No poem stands alone.

I edit the book as a moral system, not a personal record. Meaning tends to emerge through order, restraint, recurrence, and delay.

The sonnet is the primary containment device. Its discipline prevents sprawl and guards against both sentimentality and retroactive explanation. Where pressure exceeds its capacity, the form mutates deliberately: villanelles enact ritual compulsion; sestinas rotate recurrence without release; inverted sonnets reveal origin in the couplet; mirrored constructs trap authority inside its own vocabulary. Formal escalation follows existential escalation.

Revision operates under constraint. It is not improvement so much as ethical re-engagement. Editing may tighten breath, intensify recurrence, sharpen risk, or re-enter earlier material under new pressure. It may not explain trauma, soften danger, insert commentary, or offer consolation. If myth enters, it does so knowing that myth precedes the law it outlives. History does not scale morally; it scales administratively. It survives belief.

If a poem feels volatile, revision attempts compression rather than diffusion. The wound remains visible. Rhetoric, as my father observed, can behave like a concealed instrument.

Low Country — Fear is installed before language.
High Ground — Inheritance is audited after consequence.
Protocols — Intimacy behaves as system.
Oracular — Knowledge is unstable and unusable.
Systems — Power operates without intimacy.
Mythos — Myth precedes and outlasts law.
Wickham — Rhetoric launders harm.
Precedents — Nothing begins; every act has prior condition.

The book reduces illusion through sequence. It moves from lived installation to reflective distance, from personal system to impersonal machinery, from machinery to mythic substrate, and finally to juridical recurrence. By the final gallery, judgment is no longer rhetorical. It is structural.

Hallucinations does not resolve what it describes. It demonstrates that architecture precedes intention, language outlives agency, and precedent governs the living.