A Vow

When I look into your eyes

I don't see a reflection-

Inside those crinkles that tell me your smiling

and besides that twinkle in your iris

I see my future being played out

underneath your eyelid.

When your hand intertwines with mine

it is a promise

That our love knows no decay

There are no wrongs, no mistakes

It is a promise of love,

to dedicate

our lives to each other

forever, and always.

Keeping Up Appearances

Planning one of the best days of your life should surely be a joyous and exciting experience; finally the freedom to have things how you want it, having the people you love around you. But no, not really. Again and again, society intervenes and circumvents our expectations- hinders our freedom and inundates us with irrelevant and ridiculous expectations of what it should be:

You should wear white, your dress should be long, you should be thin and beautiful, your hair should be impossibly perfect. You should cover up those tattoos: they're unsightly. Your face should be blemish free, dewy, baby-skinned. You should wear minimal make up. You should have a wedding band, you should have this engagement ring. Your cake should be this colour, this brand, it should be this flavour. This person not this person should be a bridesmaid. Oh no, you mustn't include that in your invite; that is not correct wedding etiquette! Your groom should be impeccably groomed- no pun intended. His suit should fit perfectly. You should invite these people and not those. You should say this in your ceremony and not that. You should serve this wine, this food, and have this type of music. Your bouquet should be this colour. Your toilet paper should smell like chocolate and be hand crafted out of silk. He must have a stag do and of course he should invite those people who have jumped on the bandwagon because their own pathetic lives are so unfulfilling that they have to impose themselves on others. He must succumb to all that stag-like debauchery, and so should the bride: but doesn't that 'celebration of the final days of freedom' completely undermine the marriage, isn't it a little archaic? Why get married if you don't see yourself as free afterwards?  Of course, it's what you want, because why would you want anything besides the normative?

This isn't cynicism, or narcissism. It's a plea for free will- to not be confined by society's expectations (which might be slightly ironic as marriage is an expectation of society). Do we even know what freedom is? Can we even make our own decisions, because it seems like everything has a way it should be, or at least what it shouldn't be.

After all, freedom is an illusion in this society, we are so indoctrinated by images of how things should be, what ideals we should adhere to, and what we shouldn't, that we struggle to see a life outside of these binding constraints. I want to see it.

Measurements

There's no peace,
Not in this life
Defined by body types
and whether you have a gap between your thighs

Success, written in the curvature
of your arse - or chest -
Measure me?
Be my fucking guest.

Do I meet the requirements?
Have I passed the test?
Too large, Doesn't fit the mould
they said

Nonetheless, bodies reduce to bones
a skeleton: equal in the end
No evidence is left
What did you expect?

So, how big is your coffin when you die?
How many attendees at your funeral,
what did you leave behind?
A bank balance
-That's nice

I Have A Dream

"I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal."
-Martin Luther King, 28th August 1963

We're in 1960s America. The jubilation is ecstatic. Waves of triumph electrify those once deadened eyes of the segregated race: black Americans. Safety is reassured as the laws that tortured them for centuries are undone. Years of countless campaigning has paid off. It has all been for something. By law, segregation and racially motivated violence has ended. By law.

Revolution doesn't follow. Racism continues. Discrimination in the workplace continues. The 'equal but different' philosophy of the 1800's Jim Crow Laws continues. A change in law cannot establish a change in lifestyle.The resounding problem is that of unfaltering opinion rooted in centuries of the same narrow-minded, uneducated drivel; opinions concocted by the elite and powerful and fed through society over centuries. Stories and myths about what is 'right' and what is apparently 'wrong'. So the overturning of state-school segregation by the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education case, in no way made it easier for Black Americans to be accepted by their white peers and similarly the Civil Rights Act of 1964 did not disparage all racism from the workplace either. Reaching 'true equality' is an ongoing battle for the majority of us even in the 21st Century.

_________________________________________________________________________________

It's the 26th of February 2012. I was walking home from my local convenience store. I'd visited this place a few times but it was still interesting to look around at the buildings as I walked back to my Dad's fiancée's house. My pockets were weighed down with a can of ice tea and some skittles, it was getting a lot darker. I knew my Dad would worry about me, the area wasn't a particularly good one to be walking around in this late at night, and more than anything I knew he was anticipating the arrival of the skittles. My slow wander turned into a run back to Dad. I didn't want to worry him. The slamming of a car door nearby made me uneasy. I quickened my pace. I could hear footsteps fastly approaching behind me. I was being followed. I turned abruptly catching the guys nose with my fist. I knew I shouldn't have wandered back from the store. The guy continued towards me, he must've been about 30 years old. He didn't match the description my Dad gave me of the kids who'd been causing trouble around the retreat. I realised too late that I did. Someone please help me I thought over and over. I tried to force the guy away from me yelling 'help' as loudly as I could hoping that someone would hear me. 'Help' I shouted, my mouth becoming dry and coarse as the word resonated against the walls, fell against them, reaching no ears. No one came to save me.

Before I knew it a gunshot had been fired. I fell to the ground. -I had been murdered.

No, that's not my account. But if it was, is there anyway that you would doubt that I had been murdered? Shot to the chest by a 28 year old male, armed only with a can of ice tea and a bag of skittles. Pursued by that male, against police instruction (on calling the police whilst in the car they advised him to remain in there and told him not to pursue the 'suspicious' person). Yes I defended myself but since when did a broken nose equal a gunshot? Is it only murder because I'm white? because I'm female? Does race or sex really come into the equation? If I were a 17 year old black male by the name of Trayvon Martin I wasn't murdered. This was just self defence under the 'Stand Your Ground' Law.

"A stand-your-ground law is a type of self defence that gives individuals the right to use reasonable force without any requirement to evade or retreat from a dangerous situation"

George Zimmerman was acquitted of the charges of second degree murder and manslaughter on the 13th of July 2013 by a jury made up of 5 white, and one black woman. Zimmerman pleaded self defence against a 17 year old black male whom he had racially profiled as 'suspicious' and 'dangerous'. Why 45 years after discrimination based upon race, gender and religion, is a teenager murdered for belonging to a certain race and therefore fitting into a certain narrow-minded stereotype?

Is the loss of a black man's life not worth punishment?

Since when did being black make someone a threat? When does pursuing and then shooting someone, regardless of being suspicious of them, not account to either murder or manslaughter? When is a gunshot reasonable force against a can of drink and a bag of skittles? How does a teenager running create a 'dangerous' situation? What about this teenager arouses suspicion or any essence of danger?

And we ask; what if Trayvon Martin was white? What difference would that have made?


The fact that Trayvon Martin's race is a factor in all of this is just wrong. Whether Trayvon Martin was murdered or not, is not reliant on whether he was black or white. His life was taken on unreasonable grounds, and it is more than disrespectful to leave this case without justice for Trayvon and his family- justice for Black Americans. 58 years since Emmett Till became the martyr for equality, we have a new martyr: Trayvon Martin.

"I have a dream today..." - Martin Luther King, 28th of August 1963

... that equality will be a reality and not just legislatory, that opinions will change and people will be accepting and understanding of people regardless of race, religion, gender and sexuality. It's unrealistic, I know.

The First Time

It was the first time
I smiled
And it reached my eyes

I laughed, wholeheartedly
No emptiness
Full of life

Whispered beautiful
Declarations of love
Devoid of cynicism

Felt wanted,
Purposeful
- Loved

Fairwell to the Fairground

Life isn't about fun and games, those ideals spoon fed to us as children, as teenagers, are nothing more than  candy floss coloured, E numbered up, sugar coated lies. "Eat up it's good for you" the smarter of us are reassured whilst we hold these spoon-fed lies in our mouths reluctant to swallow it down like the rest. Eventually it starts sticking in your throat, the sugar coating isn't sweet enough, not convincing enough and the cheap taste of polystyrene seeps through. Bland, phoney, unappetising- that's what it's really like. And once you uncover that bland plastic taste underneath all the sugar coating, it'll never go away.

We compete to have the best, the most convincing sugar coating over our bland lives of polystyrene. Trying to forget that we ever tasted the bitterness- the truth behind it all. Everything becomes a competition, not doing something because you want it but because someone else does. Scrambling around on your hands and knees for the last scraps of sugar to coat the bitterness, engorging yourself into obesity just to escape reality.

It makes you feel fucking sick, sick to the stomach. Sick because there's no cure for it.

Freedom Is An Illusion

Sometimes it'd just be easier to eradicate the necessity of decision making. Remove freedom. Wipe the slate clean of guilt and second guessing and those formidable 'what ifs?'. To be pre-programmed, wired, robotic; emotionless. To drift through life carefree. Robotic-robust-mundane. 

''Robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes''

- Richard Dawkins

I'd condemn this as being painfully and poisonously cynical, but really are we anything more than robots? Does freedom even exist in reality or is it just an idyllic concept?

What even is freedom?

To summarise the Oxford Dictionary, freedom is:

1. The power or right to act, speak, or think as one wants- absence of subjection, independent of fate or necessity
2. The state of not being imprisoned or enslaved
3. Freedom from the state

The absence of restriction: does that really equate to 'freedom'? How can absence correlate to things that we have been granted, for instance; the right to vote? It's logically impossible for absence to equate to something: the absence of sadness does not revel the subject into happiness.  'You can't prove a negative' (James Randi) so can a negative be 'something'?

Freedom from the state: can you call a society that is so heavily stipulated by money, and the media, free? Why if we are free to do as we please do we all aspire to such similar ideals, why do we follow the same path and conform to the same standardised expectations? Complete freedom from the state would entail a society whereby aspirations were based purely on happiness rather than social, political or economic factors. Where people had the opportunity to do whatever they wanted to do rather than being pigeon holed, spoon fed and indoctrinated into a 'career' prescribed to them by their socio-economic status- and nothing else. Why do we feel obliged to do things that we don't want to do? It still feels like we need to break free from the constrictive chains of society, the cyclical 9-5 ominous clock ticking lifestyle- if that's the sentiment how can this adhere to 'freedom from the state'?

But do we even want to be free?

All we seem to do is restrict ourselves. Walking the same paths over and over again although there's nothing stopping us from wandering off in another direction. It's as if we all know we're free but there's some mental incapability to allow ourselves to fully embrace the freedom that we've been granted or to overturn the constraints of society. We enjoy being comfortable, not having to worry, eradicating decision making is so much easier- but then nothing seems worthwhile. We can't have it all.

Are we free by nature but extrinsically restricted by our own surroundings?

Intrinsically free- extrinsically constrained.