Prisoners

When freedom is a chimera

When our own worth is determined by motifs

Of failures, half-failures and glorious failures

Contrived as achievements, shared achievements and great achievements

Where the journey towards fulfillment

Alienates us to ourselves

We are all voids

Filling our silences with screams of our imprisoned selves

Striving to break free

Yet drowning in the quick sand of our anxieties

Building our own asylum

As we pretend to cure our minds and bodies

Of our social conditions

Insiders yet outsiders

Insiders looking out

While pretending to be outsiders looking in

Peering through the windows

Of our own limitations

Longing to break free

Yet building walls

Reacting, following, replicating

The phantoms of our uniqueness

The dead as living

The living in demise

Embracing the illusions of our realities

Murdering the realities of our illusions

In life, as in death

The prisoners of our own design

Savages as the civilised

The civilised as savages

Lighting our own pyres

The “I” as “we”

The “we” as “I”

All that remains

Is the effigy of burnt time.