A Price Tag On Every Soul Poem by John Sensele

Everybody bears a price tag
Claim tycoons with bottomless purses
With a plethora of dollars to flash and flag
About to entice simpletons who deem their lives struck by curses

Inserted in their DNA
Generations ago
Which render them incapable to shove away
Bets of cash their stricken spines can't forgo

While stomachs groan and lips
Demand smartphones, mascaras and lipsticks
Deployed to slay chaps with wanton whips
That cut and slice with savage kicks

On pates gone wan with insomnia
As limousine driven juggernauts
Splurge huge wads of notes to catalyze mass hysteria
Among street corner astronauts

Whose flight to Cupid exoplanet
Fell on its face
As moral worth net
They chose to suppress

In the face of perennial penury
That nibbles homesteads bereft of meals
In January
When cash overloaded sovereigns strike asymmetric deals

In which they beat down the cashless
Unless the poor rebuff cash offers
Preferring the famine and thirst the voiceless
Endure twenty four seven cos their coffers

Cash they've never seen
Cos fate shifted the balance of resources in favour of the few
Who more often than not turn out mean
To taunt the poor who shift on a church pew

As a tycoon blurts, ‘There's a price tag on you
The sooner you acknowledge the reality
The better your world will enliven anew
As on you my bucks bestow and restore dignity in humility.'