I envy the birds
How they spread their wings
And soar through the sky

Not a thought on their mind
Free to fly far away
Let the wind carry them

But here I am locked
In this small gilded cage
And my wings are clipped

Silver ferns grow in a meadow of furiously bright flora,
Cosmos,
Freesia,
Roses of red and white,
Grow freely,
Wild below the pristine marble pedestal sitting center the clearing,
Within,
A,
Delicately wound cage calmly sits a equally small bird,
Breathing in the sweetness of the meadow,
Fluttering peacefully,
Their talons rest atop the door,
Of,
Its Gilded Cage.

Lost boys
Running down the streets
Cutting corners in their haste
To get away from life.

The parrot has 3 billion neurons in its brain
We have 86 billion
And most of mine are busy
forming unhelpful pathways
Misleading my good intentions.
Still, 3 billion neurons
seems like enough room for a few
unruly pathways


The parrot can repeat phrases
Which we thought to be
pretty cool
So we trapped him
and put him in a cage
And in our living rooms
Alone


The parrot knows how to survive happily
Within his world
Within his world, with 30 others of his kind
And a partner for life.
In his world
he would fly with his flock
To trees to pick fresh fruit
Now he perches on his own
And picks dry fruit out of a bowl.
In his world
he would prune his partners feathers
He would look after her
And she him
Now he perches on his own
And prunes his feathers
until there are none left.


Its an unhelpful neuro pathway, you see?
Some form of OCD?
Maybe its a way to cope?
Maybe its the brain spiralling
Trying to figure out what to do
Because it can't be a parrot anymore
It has to learn to be a toy
A talking point
And the parrot doesn't know how to be that
He only knows how to be a parrot

Nobody's born that way.
It's the life you grow up in.
The choices you were given without the liberty to make them
The choices that were forced upon you
The life you once thought nurtured you, grew around to betray you
Tell me where's the liberty of choice? Liberty to taste freedom?
Liberty to escape not just from anyone else but sometimes from yourself too?
Liberty to escape without being called a coward, without being chased down by the terror you were escaping from.
Tell me then, tell me your expectations from a person
who carries the life that betrays her,
Terror that fills her up with dread and fear
Her survival at the stake of uncertainty
While most of the days,
She lives one day at a time
Waking up at the cusp of night
Contemplating what body she'll wake up in  tomorrow
Her mind, foreign to herself
Her much too familiar bed, a misfit against the markings on the wall
The walls of her bedroom, which were once yellow, now a dull blue
And this is just one of her many, many phases
She bleeds in colours,
Rarely red anymore
She hopes for her favourite one
But little did she know, the hope that almost flitted from her soul
Like a bullet graze had left a wound that can never be healed or forgotten