Time for money
Sanity for country
pay your taxes
pay your dues
you only have your humility left to lose.

We've only just started ascending
we'll learn what depths we will reach
when the news starts trending.
Plugged into a jaded reality
curl up to benefit ****
grab some food
get warm
it's not your austerity
it's the ones you deem not fit to breathe
the ones you'll never see
because they're on floor 5000
their problems are there to count, never to solve.

Fixed on repeat with stagnation as aural salvation
they dance to the archaic discord
entombed in relics from 1973
rooted in pensivity behind the repetition of each melody
they've heard this one before
used it to pick themselves up from the floor
an effigy to lost lovers
who used to sit beside them
smoking on the balcony
paying duty to a capitalist society
taxing themselves with each breath.

They never hear the strings breaking in silence
dancing through progressions
which paint plaintive signs of the times
disparity haunts the rhymes
but nostalgia stole the show
apathy drives ignorance
to the songs, they don't know.

Artists gorge on the decline
too many pills to swallow
so instead, they'll do another line.

Don’t look down
where emaciated bodies lie beyond salvation
they’re beneath you
when you preach for profit.

Don’t look down
to idle bones on the edge of prison walls
they’ve already fallen
their hands too bloodied to shake
their eyes too blind to see the mistakes they are yet to make.
Save the souls with the pound sign goals
avert your eyes from the misery of the fallen
they’re not even there
if you don’t look down.

I’ll light another cigarette
As the Roman candles burn,
Lace the atmosphere with lamented regret
And tear it away before it slips into the chain of deterioration.

I’ll cut out my tongue
While there’s something left to say
I’ll retain the mystery
Whilst the rest is lost to history.
With adoration as a breaking point
I’ll feel each part of me disjoint
Under the pressure.
I’m just another guilted plague-
Haunting the crypts of nature
When the morality bomb drops
I’ll collect the shards
Use poetry as a Perspex,
Desire as a casket
I’ll build wordless pyres
Under motionless fires
And choke the concordance
With a suffocating breath of ecstasy
Until my lungs are transplanted with ivy
Disrupts the chemistry
As hydrogen tears through me
And we burn under element number one.

I glossed over the cracks
that kept the illusion intact
sweet vapid intention
which was never intended for annihilation
just a purpose
that may have been beyond our comprehension.
I waited for the neural itch to decode
I waited for the dream state to dissipate
after I found the roadmap in the scars you could never hide.
We never had a direction
yet we embraced the fluidity that allowed us to exist in a vacuum
of possibility
where we forget the name of every ghost that lingers on the periphery.