Time to Let it All Go

by: E.M. Burlingame

There’s nothing but ashes we owe.
Now the world’s a burning matchstick
clenched between god’s yellow teeth,
smoke curling like a last confession.
We keep counting the cracks in reality
while merchant princes tally our debts
in ledgers of lives and pounds of flesh.

They sold the horizon to build a better cage,
paved our gardens into parking lots,
fed our children to the coyotes,
leaving us to rummage through the trash
of their bankrupt economies.
Believing they’d fool us into another centuries lie.
But the second law hums through power lines—
entropy a lover who can’t write back.

There’s no resurrecting a ghost.
Not the futures they strangled with our labour,
not the social obligations ground into dust
beneath the bootheel of compound interest.
Tomorrow’s just a gutted slot machine—
we pull the lever, and the lights just laugh.

The slavers still preach from their posh offices,
leveraging our cells for shareholder dividends,
palming the future like a stolen watch.
No, the robots won’t save us, kid.
Neither will the quantum and AI gods—
hollow sputtering equations in the dark.

So let the lie die.
Let the screens flicker out like fireflies.
Let the steel beams rust and rot.
Let the concrete blisters bloom.
We’ll carve our names into the mud,
As our ancestors did before,
trade algorithms for homemade whiskey,
relearn the dirty prayer of touch.

Some old bastard poet said we’re all just
walking sores looking for a bandage.
Fine!
Let merchant princes choke on their gold-flecked vomit.
We’ll hitchhike through the reset and collapse,
singing off-key to a cracked dashboard Jesus—
alive, ugly, glorious.
Fuck it! —
let the rats and dandelions inherit the rest.