You give up your voice
When you choose to take their hand
You sacrifice your honor
When you go joining their faceless band
You deem yourself unremarkable
Once they take away your vote
No longer choosing for yourself
Their drudging spirit grabs your throat
The hoard directs you how to think
& can make you recite all sorts of things
You deserve your time in Hell
When you hand them your own strings
Discounting the overland wages
Discarded notions of an empty word
Dripping coffee on innocently blank pages
Drudging toward all the invocations misheard
Your idols weren’t half the men
They thought they were half a bottle in
Cowardly hiding behind unjust traditions
Sinning while gulping juniper medicinal gin
Their women languishing in the shadows
Cast off from any chance to reach the light
Yet those damsels can see through the dark
The perfect heroine to save an errant knight
Misconstrued notions of dynamic parity
Swabbing the deck with your fallen idol
Ink smudges & literary drudges
Methinks – their mothers should’ve used spermicidal
Our private thoughts remain unimpeded
Keeping the ghost light on those theater steps
Daily life can become a sullen drudgery
Yet still remembering when my heart last leapt
Captain Q 