Poem:

Perfect

Perfectly placed propaganda

Displayed everywhere my eyes can see

I am suffocated by opinions

nowhere near my own

And, if I were to express myself

Things wouldn’t be perfect

We can’t be imperfect

That’s what I’m told

Perfectly priced black uniforms

Hung on the cold metal racks

Anything but black would make you different

Straight, loose rags with no style, no design

Anything else wouldn’t be perfect

We can’t be imperfect

That’s what they tell us.

Perfectly planted cameras

That we pretend we can’t see.

They think we don’t notice them

Watching our every

Perfect move

They help make us perfect.

Because we can’t be imperfect.

Not while they watch us.

My heart aches,

My head hurts,

My stomach turns.

I miss being able to change the channel.

I miss being able to wear red.

I miss being able to not feel them watching,

I miss not feeling trapped.

Perfectly free

I miss being imperfect.

 

While writing this poem, I tried to put myself in the shoes of a person living in a totalitarianism, dystopia world. They have no control of anything they do and must follow everything the government forces them to do. For example, as I said in the poem, only be able to watch the government’s propaganda on TV, not be able to wear anything other than their uniform and also always feel like they are being watched. I used an alliteration at the beginning of almost every stanza to try and describe the feeling of routine and “perfection” that this protagonist is living in. In the last stanza, I wanted to express to my audience that my character felt trapped and missed the old life they used to live, before the dystopia.