One Size Fits All

(Part of the series "On the Establishment, Care, and Maintenance of Personal Social Parameters")

Don’t squeeze me into templates,
or assume that I’m like you:
you’d actually have to be me
to know what I call “true”.

Don’t quote me words
from your myriad gods,
sold wholesale with ten percent markup
by televangelist frauds.

Don’t tell me your country is the best
while flapping your flag at me,
and kindly cease this meme about
land of the brave and home of the free.

Stop for a while your vapid speech
about conditioned point of view,
and seek out wisdom in others:
learn truth you never knew!

Don’t cram me in your little box,
full of dogma too demanding;
come join the march for global peace,
inclusion, and understanding.

Fences

(Part of the series:  On The Establishment, Care, and Maintenance of Personal Social Parameters)

We each construct our fences 
to give order to our lives.
They protect our paranoia from the different, 
and the strange,
So we fence off this idea, 
that concept, or belief, 
then mount a set of guidelines, 
protecting it from change.

Our neighbours have their fences, 
their moats, 
and their walls,
guarding ideological boundaries, 
and isolating all.
We wave our patriotic flags, flying on each fencepost,
with rousing martial music 
giving frisson to our pride.
Our hegemonic leaders give proof
to Gramsci’s thought;
empowering us to build more walls,
and do exactly as we are taught.
Inside our tiny separate worlds,
behind the barricades,
we celebrate our freedoms,
with rockets, and with parades.

One fine day we may awake
and find our world has changed,
with our fences turned to cattle pens
as our leaders had arranged.
Can we not tear down these fences,
these abhorrent tribal walls?
Let us hasten to embrace the light
before the darkness falls.