The Controlled Poet's Experience Poem by Raj Dronamraju

I shout in my puppet voice
Volume subtracts meaning, it's just noise
The control they have over me and everyone else
Is so ingrained, so part of everything, it cannot be removed
It cannot even be detected to be removed

The words of a puppet put down on paper
The baroque streams of adjectives in alliteration
As if to prove a point on technical terms only
And the magnifying glass held up to easily identifiable tasks
Exposes nothing we don't know about already

There's nothing new
Nothing that hasn't been experienced before
Nothing that hasn't been expressed in writing or in painting or in a film
In all the tools human beings have in their repertoire

The thrill of an original thought quickly gives way to the repetition of something that's been reported before
How to tear everything around me down so I can see things as they actually are
How to get outside that control programmed before birth

I would describe my home, my neighborhood as a terrordome
And I would need to break through its outside surface
Struggling for air it feels good to gulp down precious oxygen