A Plea from JL3570D

At age 16, by royal mail, a number I received.
My heart, it sunk. ‘They’ve got me now’ and I was not deceived.
Chained into a system of taxes and of earning.
The future yawned before me, the implications burning.
“Your assimilation is complete, now learn and earn a wage.”
Some see this as empowering, I just saw a cage.
It soon transpired that every act required me to be
Defined, pinned down and measured; the antithesis of ‘free’.
A card for this, a pass for that, a username, a code.
I must prove my identity to use the very road.
You pin me down with reference tags like a moth inside a case.
I may not pass beyond these shores before an image of my face
Is securely pasted into a special little book
That records the details of my birth as well as how I look.
And it was at birth this trap was sprung as my father signed the form
Defining me in syllables while the placenta was still warm.
With your process and your system I must define my very flesh.
I am snared inside a database, just a digit in a mesh
Of social construct spread across a global nation
A myth by definition of a human fabrication.
I could run Land’s End to John O’Groats then swim across the sea.
The land and waves would not demand I prove that I am me.
And this ‘me’ will shift, this ‘me’ will change, this ‘I’ will flex and grow
Your world denies my place within this universal flow
My existence in an accident, a happy slip, a chance
An unexpected syncopation in this cosmologic dance
My place in time and form in space cannot be spreadsheeted
And when I’m dead I will be gone not just ‘cause I’m deleted.
This ball of rock belongs to all of us yet none
It is not your algorithm that drives it around the sun
It does not even notice us, as far as I can see;
I beg to just live on it without bureaucracy.