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Salient. An Organ of Student Opinion at Victoria College, Wellington, N.Z. Vol. 3, No. [3]. 1940

Blues [Poem published in Salient Vol. 3, No. 3. 1940]

Blues.

The world is wrong; it is all upset and is not a place for war at all. We have certain things about us. We want to eat and be sociable, we want sex and a bit of satisfaction for the ego in us, but the world we live in won't give it to us.

Man has made a mess of his attempts to make the world fit to live in. We have made an environment that gives us sensations but it is not satisfying sensation - - it does not make the happy beings we planned it to: instead we have cities of ordinary half-satisfied creatures, not sufficiently craven to break out, half fed, yet still hungry - - yet not to distraction. We try to satisfy our desires in the naked form, but are not allowed to. It is bad, dirty, unsocial. All the forces of coercion, are applied by society to stop such expression, Why? Nobody knows, the coercing spinsters least of all.

The psychologist says that it is a projection of self guilt arising from unsatisfied urges in the old: it seems that they are right. But it does not change the facts. We are not happy. We are not ourselves; we can't be; society says, No! All we can do is to go to sordid places of "entertainment" and try to get rid of our repressed impulses in second hand sensation. We weep and laugh in the 'theatre and come out sighing more bitterly against our unsatisfied life than before. We indulge in a wallow of sensual masturbation in playland, and go away feeling weak all over - - to wake the next morning with a heavy hang-over, of anxiety, neurosis and a greater loathing than before for the dordid unattractive routine that makes up our lives - - half lived by half people, all of us frightened to be ourselves.

Gurth W. Higgin.