A man I am meant to love told me the amount of skin I show represents my right to consent.
Flesh = Yes
Clothes = No
"Deserving" is a word he used.
A grandfather told his grandchild she deserved to be abused based off the length of her skirt, but this is old news; same story.
Only, I've heard it one time too many and now I'm sick of it.
"Devastated" over my hypothetical ****, he'd said,
as though his feelings mattered more than my right to my body.
Well, **** him.
I'm tired of prioritising people whose opinions are so archaic they can't see the crime in their words.
And his words hurt.
He defended the 'nature of men', claiming its an inbreed instinct,
tried to explain the appeal of women as though I don't already know.  
Jokes on him.
I'm gay.
But I've never been under the illusion it's okay to objectify or intimidate your way into a person's life.
I've never felt entitled to a person I've liked
And there lies the generational divide
Because neither has my brother.
Being "unable to control certain urges" is just another lie they feed you to perpetuate a culture of ****.
I'm seventeen, and yet I know the fear a predatory gaze can cause,
I've been leered at to the extent I honestly thought this is it.
This is the moment I've been warned about.
And then I thought "It's my own fault.
It's dark, it's after nine, I went out running in only a sports bra,
of cause I'm going to find trouble"
because I forgot that I'm not an object.
I'd been fed the same message so frequently it was ingrained into my fight or flight response.
Doesn't that speak for itself?
I'd been conditioned to accept the blame before the finger was even pointed.
So when my grandfather looked me in eye and said he thought girls where asking for it by the way they dressed,
I didn't have the energy to suppress my response.
I asked him if I'd been out drinking with friends wearing a sheer dress and matching bralette, and I was *****, would he consider it my fault.
His answer was met with stunned laughter.
Yes, he'd consider me to blame, and indicated his disappointment should weigh on my conscious.
I am shamed I have the same genetics as such a man.
At least I've learned to drown out his words so they can no longer effect me.

I had a little top knot
Nothing would it bare
But a sliver of insight
And a wooden stare
The Head of Human Resources
Came to visit me
And all for the sake
Of what I came to see

His tie was made of crimson,
Jet black was his hair,
He asked me for my insight
I gave my wooden stare.
He said, "My lovely maiden,
You surely must agree,
We'll take from you your insight
And all that you can be.

The history of this story
With you I’ll gladly share
Henry sought sweet Catherine
His crown and ring to wear
Her services she rendered
But in targets she fell short
And from the royal company was
Dropped without a thought





Brought up to date I tender
This modern tale of woe
As working in the system
Requires us to forego
All sense of moral fibre
In putting people first
For prioritising production
Is how we now are versed.

Efficiencies and targets
The management declares
Will give us a competitive edge
And bolster up the shares
To keep your jobs work harder
Your Country needs the wealth
But we all know who’ll benefit
At the cost of your mental health.

So **** your corporate vision
I’ll take my chance elsewhere
It might bring short term hardship
But a better life I’ll share
And while your head is in the clouds
My feet are on the ground
Co-operative community
Is where our strength is found

macbeth: it was (once) the owl that shrieked,
  the fatal bellman.

aye, and i too would ask the urban folk
concerning family and congregation
for any event apart from the most cherished:
for i love only those with whom i eat,
and abhor those with whom i drink:
for i deem them sour company.

and if in haste? from Canterbury seek New York,
there you'll learn a thing or two about
gnarling from a yew tree strained against
the ranks and rags of French nobility...
there, dear sir, will you learn the Welsh Churchill
acronym, by the index and middle i say:
pointing toward the sky as if to navigate
a seagull pooping fresh manna
onto a desert plain for an *oasis of sustenance.
clearly the U was never chiseled into bone or
marble, instead a V... which always confuses
my expertise (2014 GSCE gimmick,
expert-... ease? titillation? prioritising?
no wonder they send spies to south korea to
feed off jealousy of the porcelain skinned
and squinty eyed crap of Zen... because Tao
was the practice of not dipping your head in
a honey jar and running up to a beehive for
a Frenchy) / in Grecian (yes,
poets have abhorring punctuation,
they're donning a take on rasta roots: dreadlocks
  inserted between the talk of personal hygiene
   and vanity performances of family life solidification
to seem the ideal citizen).
      poetry really is an obscurity of prose,
      it's that ****** cousin you hide in the attic,
when you stage poetry against prose
you never, really, get a snooze button fault
while taking a microcosmos of thought to bed
  and "forget" reading something....
   a true testament to poetry? something Mussolini
might say... i am a fascist fetishist: in that
i am also a schadenfreude: a shadowy frau...
   i like to see fascism in others...
          well, you know, Hollywood got sickly sweet
over the years, there's no enough Bruce Lee films
to satiate the palette of middle aged crimbo men...
  don't expect a ****** to know the cartwheel mechanics
readying a girl into ballet...
       cos no attitude brings no Bolshoi, girlfriend.
oh god, how can this age and my contemporaries provide
so many stereotypes?! they're all gay...
         there's me with my pouting but really alcoholic-bloated
face, rummaging in pop culture under the exacting maxim
of: the idiots have all the confidence, the smart uns
      have all things Cartesian...
             you swarm over reactionary talk?
i guess modern people really want to engage in dialectics,
but the current sophistry, the current rhetoric,
     is only based (in bias) against any Cartesian intervention...
the "i think" doesn't precipitate into "i am"...
for example? even wittle Adoolf thought he was good,
but then world war ii and therefore kicked in,
    there was nothing good to be said, apart from
a historical endeavour as to why: the New Year's Eve
Ball of Vienna faked a smile to solidify a permanent
audience...
                      this fire-yawning rhetoric is part of
the zeitgeist (holy ghost) of our times...
                                it's enough that i'm reading the
news review contained in a sunday newspaper on a tuesday,
but another that i'm rereading lawrence lipton's
the holy barbarians at the same time... yep:
the father of the guy that interviews actors on that
show the actors' studio... where we learn all things
sentimental... just before Robbie Williams tightens
the noose and everyone's bloated...
which is odd: it was a promising afternoon...
           i know that society really wants to engage with
dialectics, i've been watching lemon-*******-sessions'
worth of cringe concerning Milo Yiannopoulos -
papa-dough-pu-louse (Greeks have surnames like
dinosaur names: word and verbiage in one go...
a bit like decapitating Anne Boleyn,
executioner on tiptoe) -
                 it would be far more easier to stage
a place by Shakespeare that it would be to stage a
conversation by Socrates... that's how difficult
practising dialectics is... so much so that people invented
diacritical indicators to syllable dissections of words
and then forgot to use them... buttnaked Adam of Essex.
but one thing caught my eye...
  not in a rude way... well... Bruce Willis in mercury rising...
      isn't the Greek a tad bit autistic?
those darting eyes, and whenever a confrontation emerges
the sunglasses are invoked? isn't the confrontationalist
an autistic phenomenon? isn't this autism?
   aren't people rebelling against the spaz?
   the cover-up is obviously homosexual, because there's this
underlying subplot... high functioning autism,
i might momentarily get an eye-contact...
       but anglophone psychiatrists have only two notations
to curate the spectrum of "mental" problems:
1. biting your nails...
          and 2. eye contact.
                  if psychiatry is philosophy without thinking,
then philosophy is psychiatry without being...
              catchphrase? i hope to god no.
               god... well: that's when you say:
i do have limitations in my vocabulary... hence the invocation
to a ulterior being, other than my self
                 (yes, the reflective version of the reflexive myself).
      sure as hell there needs to be a dualism
rather than a monism concerning the 1 + 1 = 2 humanism
of cogito ergo sum, can you imagine a consolidation?
how, in the 21st century (which wasn't that spectacular
even though the evangelicalists stressed was the zenith
and a basis for: no future) the two would never meet?
    if anyone Descartes poked fun at it too:
i'm pink, therefore i'm spam.
                                       can you imagine why some people
were diagnosed with schism that later referred to a mind?
            uncomfortable people for social cohesion are ill...
it's because the healthy people are whipped into
constructing society.
                               adding to the fact that if mental
and physical converged and were made equally obstructive
in hindering people, a fewer number of jobs / specialisations
would exist to counter such grievances...
      you term mental illness i term lethargy and
thinking turned into the equivalent of what the heart is:
de-automated heart turned into poetic muse...
                but otherwise? an automaton pump.
and when thinking becomes automaton prone...
       and when thinking becomes too conscious of perceiving
the body as caged, doubly in a world and earnestly
in the cycle of eat sleep **** repeat... when too much
theory pours into an abstracting pronoun of forgotten Latin
and resurgent Latin with a summary of ego...
   when that becomes a Shiva-likened extra limb...
               when thought becomes automated
  but the body isn't... when thought diverges from any
moral construct to be made intrinsic in the complement
of choice as its sole outlet,
                 all variations of thought necessarily translated
into a narrative die out... because, as it turns out,
              not all narratives are pharmaceutical escapisms
to the equivalent of medicating seriously...
            even though the sky is blue in winter
and all decaying flush of colour of autumn is long gone...
i feel no bolder to stampede against the earth's
tides insurrecting a name and month of birth
                                      as sanctimonious:
other than what the polity deems worthy for me to
inherit, that, which will be my epitaph
is all am worthy of, given such contortions: as already
evident.
    
take your heart to Scotland my good friar,
and then from on-high,
   as if between Edinburgh and St. Andrew's,
take the kingly route back south...
                    and learn to educate those who's
tongue was never kindred to cliche and barbarism,
were it not talk of puritanism and
    a hidden dialect: for no cockney would have ever
heard the seven bells,
                   and definitely shied away, spoilt,
from the meddling cuckoo;
and oh how small this world will seem,
       once you've been woven the greatest attire
of all you command to peacock,
   that operatic Monday through to Friday
that'll always be more than Gucci or an Armani belt...
    routine!

what really is the true meaning of life and why do we insist on living it?


questions infiltrate my mind
Intellect takes its prioritising position in my brain
yearning for answers, for the journey to that end
that end that so many of us have seen
where the protagonist in the movie reaches his or her epitome
to their motivation/philosophy in life to keep going

some have reached that peak, others struggle to keep afloat
for me i constantly imagine that movie-like moment to appear
somewhere, in my life.

yet i think that singular moment can transcribe into different variations
rippling with changes in its pool
with each decision as my stone skips across the ocean
tearing more and more waves
overlapping ripples with more complications and confusion

the journey is a long one and it may not be easy
but i intend to enjoy every step
learning, mourning, smiling, crying
vying for the end that dreads so near but out of reach

I would hate to disappoint you
Infact, I have always strived not to disappoint you
Now Im disappointed in you by disappointing me
I guess that was my first disappointment

Im disappointed in,
You not supporting me
You not understanding me
You not prioritising me
Your timing for me

I am even disappointed by this being about you and me, not us

Im disappointed
But not discouraged

So are the days of our lives
Living down memory lane
Taking my own lane
Prioritising my sanity
Realizing that it was all vanity
Squeezing myself into places I don't belong,
Was like hitting a gong expecting it not to make any noise
Deep down the inner voice had to make the sound
It had to show me what I was not seeing
Life is too short for you to try and be who you are not
It is too short to brag
Too short to boast
Too short to suffer
Too short not to embrace your uniqueness
Too short to spend time trying to pursue perfection
Time wasted on pursuit for perfection should have been used
in perfecting yourself
Your own craft
Your own stance
Because where you stand is where you are the strongest
Every situation you are currently in is a reason not to fail
The true strength comes in realizing that like sands in an hourglass
So are the days of our lives
Therefore use them wisely
Bring out the best version of you the world has never seen
For you are capable of anything if you put your mind into it.