The Blinkers Of Choice

With the advent of mass digital media
coming at us, from us, and from all sides,
we are warned to be very careful
about where we get our news from,
lest the presentation be tainted
with bias or foreign money/power.

But such warnings were much rarer
when the media was so analogue
that nobody needed to call it that.

I remember the small grubby emporia
in which the underground press used to appear,
the anarchist book shops full of books
that were more-left-wing-than-Left-Wing-Politics.
The sort of read where where the ink
came off on my fingers as I read
of squatting, of angry feminism,
of drugs I could never find - much less take,
and other fantastical narratives
I was never ever going to live out
.
Many of these stories lit up my life.
These texts became the pin-pricks
with which I tried to deflate
a very dull every-day reality
from which I wanted to escape,
and each text worked, for a while.

Those books never came with warnings,
the censors never knew where to look.