The nation’s heart, a rotting fruit,
bleeds neon hymns from root to root.
A grotesque waltz churns the air,
playing on porcelain smiles, devoid of care.
Politicians, masks of hollow clay,
auction hope with gloved hands,
bartering fear as flickering screens' sway.
Regarding power as a flickering game,
they invoke encrypted many digital names.
Ignoring truth as a distasteful bane,
they salivate for yet more fiscal gain.
Cold calculators, with eyes of infrared fire,
spin logic's web to gilded pyres.
Their cruel code, rushing through silicon veins,
breeds new horrors during AI's reign.
Will breakthroughs bring any gain,
or invite more extinctions and strain?
Meanwhile, deep in the underworld’s gleam,
hustlers hunt for tokens in data streams
while cyber-prophets pitch digital dreams.
Gliding through cyberspace, with spectral mien,
they offer new nightmares in a waking dream.
To hollow-eyed followers, they hand out tokens,
of pixelated gods whose voices are broken.
Below the glitched-out, lurid scene,
discarded masses, husks of what has been,
dwell in hovels made from cold commands,
built from subservience in this digital land.
The Empire feasts on itself in primal rite,
drowning its children in psychoactive light.
This soulless state, a shark of biting bytes,
hunts through the depths of endless nights.
Poets, once keepers of a living flame,
now dance with ghosts who don’t recall their name.
They murmur madness in fetid air,
their burning breath steeped in despair.
Many kneel down, their souls now weak and small,
to kiss ice-cold Mammon, surrendering all—
accepting servitude's sacrament,
all their assets, preyed upon, spent,
owned by a beast calling itself great,
its ceaseless hunger is declared a glorious fate.