The Game

How well have you learned societies rules for your life?

As a child you learn,

Life is all about the game.

About how well you play with others,

And how much you are willing to throw away.

 

I learned, a long, long time ago, that sex is currency, and skinniness pays,

That selling out is dollars and beauty is change,

And all of it is leverage, to get you ahead in the game.

Cause it’s a cut-throat race, to get to where we’re going,

Even though, in the end, we all finish the same.

 

As a woman you learn to sell your body, to push yourself,

To peddle your goods for services,

(Life is all about making the right trade.)

To spend your money on make up and lies,

To improve how you look, in societies eyes.

We learn, flesh is collectable,

And replaceable.

We learn, sex is not love �" but negotiation

And manipulation.

 

If you know �" just how to stand,

So you catch the light �" just so,

Know which ego to stroke,

Which tone to take, which face to wear,

There is nothing they won’t give you.

 

I know all the rules,

How to bend and break them,

To make them, my own.

How to look just so,

How to say all the right things

And answer the questions they haven’t even asked yet

I can play any role,

A life time of rehearsing lines

I know how to please my man, hell, I can please yours too

After all, isn’t that what it all comes down to?

 

Morals are baggage, easier to throw away.

And all of us are casualties, in this battle of the self.

And all of us are victims, of the war crimes we commit.

Every stranger is an enemy as you measure yourself against them

Whose prettier? Whose thinner?

Who is better at the game?

 

This game will destroy you,

Chew you up and grind you down.

Turn the world to circus mirrors,

So you don’t know how to see yourself,

And all you know is how to weigh your value,

In the eyes on someone else.

 

You’ll know what it means when he looks at you that way,

But you can’t stand to look at yourself.

And you can sell sex for self confidence,

But you can’t compliment yourself.

And you can change yourself so they love you,

But you can never just love yourself.

And you can lose the weight, you can lose the clothes,

While you lose sight of yourself…

 

This is the game we teach our children,

These are the values we instill,

We teach them not to love themselves,

But only that they must be worthy of the love of another.

And worth; is thin, plastic and easy.

We teach them not that they are beautiful,

But only that they should be more perfect still.

Then we sigh tragically and shake our heads,

When our teenagers end up pregnant, anorexic, or dead.

 

You may not realize your playing,

But the rules are already in your mind,

A poisonous seed, sprouting deep within your tissue,

Growing, year after year after year.

It’s in the way you look at people,

In the way you look at yourself.

And maybe it’s not healthy,

Maybe it’s not sane,

But baby, this is how you play the game.

Reviews

[TLK]

I read this as feminist hip-hop (is that the right term? I'm hopelessly uncool), which I won't argue with as I am a feminist myself.

Compare the second stanza with the first. The 2nd has a flow that makes it into urban performance poetry. The first lacks this because of the length of the lines. "As a child you learn THAT" would help with this problem. "are willing to" makes the fourth line too long: you could change it something thing 'can' or 'should' or 'must', depending on how much you want to stress the absoluteness of society's rules.

There is nothing they won't give you for adopting a male-pleasing feminine ideal; nothing except your self.

[Mim]

Thanks for the detailed review i appreciate it. It is interesting to think about it as being sort of "hip-hop" I never write with a particular "style" in mind and i honestly lack any kind of traditional training to distinguish between one style or another so when I write i just write it as it comes to me, write it as it "wants" to be written, so to speak. But now that you mention it I can see the potential it might have for being more "hip-hop" style!

Thanks :)