Identity

When you're young,
you're told everything
is wonderful and lovely
and free.
It's only when you
get a bit older that
you realise that the
world isn't yours and
that you're going to
spend every day
indentured to a master
you'll probably never meet
and who, in full probability,
cares very little that
you even exist.

So you try to perform
that old cliche of finding yourself,
because the real you is
probably hiding behind a rock
in your local area,
and then you scurry off to buy
the clothes, music and furniture
that show your true colours.
It's assumed your true texture
can be produced in some third world
sweatshop while you were finding
the rock your soul was hiding under.

Then, twenty years later, you have
a midlife crisis, ensured largely
by the upcoming death of Keith Richards,
but also by the fact that John Hughes
is now irrelevant and that
you've now spawned some brats to
replace you in the production machine
that have just found their rocks.

Realising that the identity rock
you found when you were sixteen
is no longer the real you, you cultivate
a new one, this time with
blackjack and hookers
and your youngest child's
dirty crapped briefs.

But even now, you're just
an indentured servant to
the money from some
big company or another.
You have no identity but
one that's been sold and
packaged to you by Paramount
and Sony; boxed and wrapped
by some guy at Spotlight.