Terms And Conditions
A poem about manufactured choices.
Agreement is often shaped by pressure. We accept the door because the lock has made refusal too costly. In that moment, permission shrinks into something smaller and harder: survival compressed into the motion of a click. How many times have you encountered a checkbox demanding consent for something you neither understand nor have real choice about? The checkbox gathers everything pressing behind it, turning consent into a quiet ritual where choice and surrender begin to blur. By the end, acceptance loses its resemblance to freedom and becomes a burden carried close to the body: a debt folded into the pocket, warming there as if it had always belonged to us.
“It is not necessary to accept everything as true, one must only accept it as necessary.”— Franz Kafka, The Trial
Terms and Conditions
I have read and accept
the terms and conditions.
They descend
in numbered ranks,
definitions nested
inside definitions.
Your rights, their rights,
the word reasonable
doing unreasonable labor.
The cursor waits
above the little box
as the kettle shrieks.
My hand knows the old ritual:
hesitation, irritation, yield.
The tick appears,
a black seed
pressed into a field
I do not own.
I accept
the door, not the lock,
the passage, not the price.
My hand moving
under the weight
of hunger, rent, grief,
and love, too,
pressing their fingers
over mine.
I accept it
like a debt
folded small
and warm
in my pocket.
Miriam H. Monarres
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Love,
Miriam
This: “Your rights, their rights,
the word reasonable
doing unreasonable labor.” 👍🏽
What stayed with me was the way the piece turns an almost automatic gesture into something deeply human and unsettling.
“Hesitation, irritation, yield” feels as though it speaks not only about checkboxes, but about many forms of acceptance inside everyday life.