The Fairytale (brought to you by Adbusters)

Your mom tells you a story before you go to bed and you believe it. She tells you that you can be anything you want to be when you grow up. She says that you are a unique and valuable individual and that you are to never forget it. She says that you are very lucky and the world is your oyster. And she is right. You live in an exceptional time. You will travel greater distances in a single day than most people only a century ago traveled their entire lives. You will have food choices that English kings and Ottoman princes couldn’t have imagined. You will casually fl ood your system to the point of illness with sugar, once the currency of the world and the prize of empires. You will live longer than any generation before. Your wardrobe will contain cloth from what was once beyond the reaches of the greatest civilizations. Broken bones won’t render you a cripple. If you were born a girl you can become a boy. If you were born a boy you can become a girl. You can break tradition without death. You can upgrade your biology and change your organs. You can assume any identity you wish. Her words comfort you into a wonderful sleep. She is careful not to explain that this oyster isn’t for all the children of the world or that such good fortune is making the Earth sick.

That would ruin the story.

-Darren Fleet

Mirror- Sylvia Plath

I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.
Whatever I see I swallow immediately
Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.
I am not cruel, only truthful-
The eye of the little god, four cornered.
Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall.
It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long
I think it is a part of my heart. But it flickers.
Faces and darkness separate us over and over.
Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me,
Searching my reaches for what she really is.
Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon.
I see her back, and reflect it faithfully.
She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands.
I am important to her. She comes and goes.
Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness.
In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman
Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.

Song of the invisible corpse- by Gregory Orr

And still I lie here
bruised by rain, gored
by the tiny horns
of sprouting grass

I hum the songs of spiders
drawing, across the blankness
of my eyes, accurate maps
for the spirits quest:
like rome or some oasis
toward which all paths tend

I am the absense
under your feet, the pit
that opens, toothed with dew

Self- By George Woodcock

Always the circle of mirrors is unbroken,
I am the person encountered at every turn
like the lead penny or perpetual ghost

It is easy to stay, it would be easiar to go
If I were not the circles, the mirrors grow
to fingers cutting off the friendly west.

And to each finger is myself as a stranger,
disorted to a grey saint or sinister lounge,
It is myself I must break to leave the circle.

It is myself I must break If I am to
reach the temperate west and love the skipped age
where the lips are not fettered or the heart single.

But it is easy to stay in the sloth that I hate,
dreading and desiring always to meet
the real stranger who will light my day.

It is so easy to wait for the mirrors to crack
instead of smashing and risking the ache
of myself broken to set a future free.

Oh sufjan...what would I do without you.