*more of a spoken word piece*

the thing is

I can’t shut my mouth,

bite my tongue,

for one thing my pain tolerance is too low -

wouldn’t allow it.

plus I’m a taurus with a leo moon so it’s not in my astrological profile to

stand down.

go on,

come at me,

I’ll come back at you with all the rage of a million oppressed women,

beaten down, called out,

told we’re not good enough for the job,

told we’re not worth listening to,

our friends are not worth listening to,

nor our mothers, nor our sisters,

but our brothers,

oh yeah, you’ll hear what they have to say.

our stories don’t matter,

unless we’re using them to flanter,

because we only get listened to when we’re

paying you direct attention.

you’ve been mollycoddled.

but that too will get blamed on your mother,

not your dad who perpetuated

boys will be boys.

and since when did wearing short shorts become a statement?

my legs are not a statement,

my body is not political,

of course everything is political these days,

it’s us Gen Z kids making

~everything about politics~

except you missed the part where a decade of Tory austerity made human rights a political battlefield,

where Cameron *fucked a pig* to take away from his racist crackdown on multiculturalism,

where May danced onto stage so we would forget she said

“There are boys jobs, and there are girls jobs”,

where corruption and cronyism rotted the NHS and a centurion raised money for it -

the NHS is not a charity

it is a public service -

and where Johnson’s funny hair and bumbling demeanour led us into an

Orwellian state

but yeah ok,

it’s all our fault really,

for protesting our right to walk down the street,

for the rights of black boys to breathe,

for an Earth that can remain green,

but just like teenagers downing spirits and rolling joints in the park at night,

just because we’re not allowed to do something, doesn’t mean we won’t.

that’s what they forgot.

we’re resilient, we bounce back,

we don’t do what we’re told,

there’s power in the people,

and power in the proles.

* bit of a rambly piece and not sure if it 100% fits the brief. Poetry isn’t what I usually write so I’m not sure if the rhythm will be conveyed the way I’ve done it but it’s something I wrote before so wanted to share it with people and thought this was the best prompt to share with! *