Prose Poetry
Our Enslavers Won’t Free Us
Should we wait for the ones who bond us to free us?
I should stop asking our captors for freedom. Stop being seduced by their lying lips. But the shackles on my wrists and ankles feel comforting when binding. I have never known the holding of a person, being born of solitude.
I understand the conundrum of my comrades, afraid of being alone in their despair. In our captivity, we are together. In our independence, we are alone.
Our enslavers have convinced us of our freedom while they whip our backs with blasting lies. But they told us our pain was our pleasure, enticing us to their plantations to tend them, growing birch to shade their house.
We should no longer wait for saviors; we should now begin with our walk. There is no paradise awaiting if selfishness rules throughout our lives. I shall not hope for the pleasures of the body. I shall not hope for the numbness of the mind. I will sing my song and walk away. Our captors will not come to free our hands.
2025. Thank you for reading.
Thank you to The Howling Owl and their editors.
Selflessness is not easy to achieve. It implies trust in others. As we place the needs of others ahead of ours, we need to ensure that what we interpret as their needs are not our needs disguised as theirs.
If I see someone who is in desperate need of money and I offer them a job for a very low wage, one I would not take myself. If I am in a position where I can offer a higher one, but in seeing the other in need and their lack of options, I offer the lower wage instead. Then, I am not being selfless but selfish.
If I give someone my time and resources, hoping they will not misuse them. But I want to profit from the time invested and the resources spent. Then, I do not give them freely. I have not given it entirely. I am still holding what I think I gave.
The givers resist loosening the reins they hold on the receivers.
Many have attempted selflessness before. And many have eventually sided on tightly controlling the reins they hold.
Selflessness requires mutual trust. But we cannot demand selflessness from others. What to do when the reins of the so-called generous people are too tight on our backs?
We would surely hope for freedom, but in a world where boundaries are everywhere, where will the vigorous horse find room to roam without being persecuted and pursued?
Is the interdependence among all such that true freedom is nonexistent? Or is it freedom to allow for a degree of change, to let our horses decide where to stop to rest: to drink by the creek to graze in the field?
Should we recognize and owe gratitude to our horses? Realizing and conceding that if we arrive at our destination, it is because we are riding on their backs?
And when their virality is gone, if there is anything of what we idealize as Human left in us, not to kill the horse to sell for meat before their time.
A note within a note:
As I was wrapping up the text, I realized how I was using horses as a metaphor for slaves, which is the subject of the first section of the essay. Slaves (like employees) are people. How can I equate people to horses? We use horses to facilitate our transportation. To go from point A to B faster and with relatively less effort.
Business enterprises have used human labor in one form or another to facilitate the movement of a corporation from a place where it makes little money to where it makes more. People who own the means of production would prefer not to share their profits. One of the items in the maximizing profits equation is reducing the cost of labor.
Money-making enterprises will reduce costs to as low as they can afford to do so legally. What many of us seem to forget is that when there is a waiter who works mainly for tips or a plantation worker (a slave) who works for a plate of rice and a precarious shelter, the person or persons who are building their wealth are doing so on their backs. Like the horseman cruising the prairie does so while riding in the back of the horse.
2025.
