We lead lives of unfulfillment.
All for nothing, our time is spent.
We just live, from day to day,
To support the government.
We are born, and then we die,
No one ever stays.
Our lives are full of emptiness
In, oh, so many ways.
We behave in regular patterns,
Everyone acts the same.
We exist in a world-wide crowd
Where no one has a name.
We thrive on repetition,
We fit into a groove,
And still we do not know
Just what we need to prove.
Then, too, we think alike,
Our thoughts are from a mold.
And if the cast were broken,
We'd be standing in the cold.
We all have religion,
One thing that we own,
And even with this difference
We can never stand alone.
We plead for independence
Something we'll never get,
For in all our commonness
It’s a man we've never met.
Our lives will always be like this,
Although we do protest.
But if we were to change,
We'd have nothing to leave the rest.
The voice of the speaker in the poem is a collective voice of the of a large population that is subservient to its society.
This poem expresses an easy trap to fall into when we live life by society's rules rather than setting our own rules and following our own aspirations.
The trap is failing to be true to oneself rather than conforming to others' expectations.
