{"id":733,"date":"2024-01-19T08:06:49","date_gmt":"2024-01-19T08:06:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tdp.mtse.co.uk\/?p=733"},"modified":"2024-01-19T08:06:49","modified_gmt":"2024-01-19T08:06:49","slug":"the-caged-bird","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tdp.mtse.co.uk\/?p=733","title":{"rendered":"The Caged Bird"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Sweet bird of mine,<br>Feathers of colour and gold,<br>Sing a song of pure for us,<br>Woe my troubles of young and old,<br><br>Locked up to perform,<br>Your smiles and sunshine taken,<br>Now nothing but a mere sideshow attraction,<br>With the strength and courage in your heart slowly breaking,<br><br>Stolen from an age of young,<br>You never really stood a chance,<br>Now you spend all your days in this rusty cage,<br>Singing songs you hate and doing your tedious dance,<br><br>The bird begs for its freedom,<br>Getting lost in its own imaginary hope,<br>But dreaming of a life outside this prison,<br>Is the only way this beautiful animal can cope,<br><br>But it already knows resistance is futile,<br>The fight inside him virtually all gone,<br>So instead of begging for freedom,<br>It sings me a pretty song,<br><br>He looks outside the window,<br>Only bars separate him from a life worth living,<br>He can taste the air of liberty upon his tongue,<br>But song and dance he must keep giving,<br><br>Over time, I saw the birds hope slowly vanish,<br>Becoming institutionalised by my greed,<br>It\u2019s spirit now broken,<br>Knowing he will never get freed<br><br>It gets fed and watered,<br>The bare minimum of existence,<br>Beaten by the hypocrisy of my wants and needs,<br>His desire for freedom now long and distant,<br><br>Sometimes I look at him,<br>With pity and sorrow,<br>With guilt in my heart, I say I\u2019ll free him later today,<br>But I said that yesterday and I\u2019ll say it again tomorrow,<br><br>Because the truth is, if I ever wanted that bird to fly,<br>I\u2019d have to open the cage door and let it free,<br>But I can\u2019t ever release him from his prison,<br>Because that caged bird\u2026\u2026. Is me.<br><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Wrote on: 19\/01\/2024<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Sweet bird of mine,Feathers of colour and gold,Sing a song of pure for us,Woe my troubles of young and old, Locked up to perform,Your smiles and sunshine taken,Now nothing but a mere sideshow attraction,With the strength and courage in your heart slowly breaking, Stolen from an age of young,You never really stood a chance,Now you&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-733","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-poems"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tdp.mtse.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/733","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tdp.mtse.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tdp.mtse.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tdp.mtse.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tdp.mtse.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=733"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/tdp.mtse.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/733\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":737,"href":"https:\/\/tdp.mtse.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/733\/revisions\/737"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tdp.mtse.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=733"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tdp.mtse.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=733"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tdp.mtse.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=733"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}