It seems somewhat disingenuous to have produced a week’s worth of poetry for a single day’s celebration, but I decided to use an existing format to advertise a worthy cause. In the end, my efforts were largely lost as individual works, so putting them together as complete entities a week on seems like a very sensible thing to do. Both of these sets of poems were written whilst I was in Birmingham, the first time that this has happened. I intend to do more location work as time goes on: it was glorious to sit, pencil in hand and write these sequences first in longhand.
https://www.instagram.com/p/BZ3X-cVFP3g/
I learnt an awful lot of useful stuff last week: not to overstretch, to rewrite (constantly) and to not be afraid to alter my perceptions of what is important. As a result, I feel these two sequences are the best produced by a long way in this process of poetic evolution.
To sit, then write words
Chosen without concern, this
Is truly freedom.
To think without fear
Pure joy, earnest expression
Woman’s true freedom.
To laugh at the joke,
Criticising: no comeback
Their own true freedom.
To believe better,
Transformation, empathy
Our right; true freedom.
To exist, equal
Consideration, respect;
Life’s meaning, freedom.
To own all such things
Yet not to understand for
Some, they don’t exist.
Greatest injustice:
Belittle those without their
Deserved, true freedom.
Only when taken away, does
Freedom really matter:
Existence, shattered.
Grasping just how lucky we are,
Liberation is gone:
Loss, horribly wrong.
Those lives that exist without rights,
Fighting for every breath
Nothing precious left.
Look to us with excess, and say:
‘Why don’t you understand?
Life is in your hands.’
Perhaps answer is to lose all:
No sitting on the fence,
Fatal consequence.
Finally, when all fear is gone,
Then truth can be revealed:
Divisions held, healed.
I control, both body and name
Not taken for granted:
Freedom, implanted.
The Internet of Words 
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