Freedom – A Poem

Give me my freedom

I cannot give what you deny you have

Give me my freedom

I can only offer mine, trap you in my life

 

Strive for freedom, now

To live without bounds, as if this were,

Somehow, our natural state

‘I am not black or white, and my history,

All the law and art that bound me,

I have forgotten, with great effort.’

 

The verse is blank, the poetry prose

Written apropos of the language

Of Sunday supplements and headlines

Written quickly, for our readers

Have deadlines. Painting is passé

Simply re-arranged some artefact

Of the everyday so it appears

 

Less commonplace. This is an expensive business.

Watching a film can be a chore

If something does not explode between

Each dialogue episode of plot moving

Couplets, less scripted than cut-outs.

No need to wait for the actor,

 

Or the producer, usually late

If they are a commuter.

We can pull out a box of chips and shoot her.

 

“Yes please, yes please, now I am truly free

To eat my hamburger instantly, while pictures entertain me

And newspapers complain superficially,

And the chiefs explain me, an ASBO in the making.

My attention is waning. I need coffee

To stay awake, then distract me

For goodness sake, until the big game.

 

I want to see twenty-two inflated wages,

Forty-four sponsored shoes run

Their hording shirts up and down the line,

A hundred times. But what is wrong?

Something weird is going on as they dash

Randomly about, the ball ignored

 

However much we shout. Some on the pitch,

Some in the stands, some resting and some

With racquets in their hands.

The referee is reading Socrates.

The crowd is tense, pensive, and I fear

Trouble brews, as an outlet for the confused

 

Minds thrown into the unknown,

Into the chaos. This cannot go on.

The vertigo of lost boundaries

Lawlessness. You cannot play games

Unless rules are made, to give form to the pieces

And someone regulates.

 

So too the poets, modernists, sculptor and novelist

So too the economist, the bin-men (or street hygienist)

The anarchist and socialist… ENOUGH

 

Thankyou Wolfe and Joyce, (to name two

Of a thousand voices), now we can see,

What was and not necessary. We have choice.

The confines and chains broken

Rules laid bare, now they must not

Be erased but replaced, not just breakers

But makers please.

 

We are trying to escape

Oxygen because it forces us to breath.

 

Rest easy that we cannot be free, nor choose

Upon which world to live, only our way

Of living, finite. Not trapped by this world

But made possible through it.