Gorged
Why aren't you working
I don't call that working
To death, dear, to death
Anything less is apostasy
What's wrong with your retinue
Have you even a retinue
Who let you think poetry
is even anything anyway
It doesn't pay
You must pay
If you make babies the government
will pay you for each of them
Reproduce because it's
good for the corporations
Always needing to replenish
the youth demographic gorged on
A nine to five job
A second six to eight job
That's an hour on each side
to live the rest of your life in
It's for the best
Markets always know what's best
Keep them free and unregulated
Let oligarchs get you relegated
You have to hammer harder
You gotta sell harder
Haven't you heard of the old hard sell
It's poverty wage here
or poverty wage elsewhere
You don't have the money
to make real money
You're a plaything for those who can pay
Those who get everybody's cloud paying them
Those the AI work for
who can afford to ask what work's for
Who get to decide what work for the rest of us
even looks like anyway
They've assured us anything worthwhile
automatically triggers a windfall
Is it a form of madness
Is it perhaps the most bankrupt madness
Bankrupt like beloved trumpism
Stare into the vacuous void of it
Let it break any tenuous grip
you might have had on any resonant aftershock
of the art you made before
hard truth remade you
Hell for most of us is worth it
if it means Heaven for a chosen few