R > G Poem by Kevin Patrick

Foreclosed signs, dot neighborhood lawns
and boarded houses mark suburban graveyards
along the littered streets of bric-à-brac
lay corpses of the Jones's seared up and charred


Are you happy where the world is going now?

They'll be no more nanny state, or welfare bums
To pick up the entrails of your hard earned crumbs
we will sink or swim based on basic primal laws
tearing up the regulations of basic human clause
Assistant Programs will be axed, and you won't pay the catch
and you won't have to worry because the poor will be taxed


Now see the stench of history claws back its misery
The middle class is now an endangered species


When Capital accumulates, the laws disintegrate
labor loses leverage, and owners take their wages
but everything is fine if you own some real estate
Property investors are moving up the dark ages
The 1 percent is growing and the 99 are shrinking
Profit margins close in, your equity is sinking
Devalued stocks are clocked, your benefits are uninsured
some advisor hatched your nest egg on a tax haven shore


No more college ambitions for well-paid professions
The path to educations been hijacked by politicians
You'll drown decades into debt on loans for tuitions
But you might just survive if you're an IT technician
til one day there's a merger and you're on the chopping block
and your jobs shipped to sweatshops or taken up by robots
and you'll be working twice as hard just picking up peanuts
trying to make ends meet with no rope, just tied knots


And the 9 to 5 shuffle, to their office towers
And Measure their lives on spreadsheets and ledgers
they adore themselves to forms, typing as they cower
In fear of their redundancy to modern days pressures
From cut throat capitalist and globalizations forward fists
We are now the prey for transnational monopolists
From Beijing to New York, and London to St Petersburg
The worlds a private enterprise, revolving all our lives


It's some sadistic equations, condemn every nation
And measures the value of life is relative to its worth
When you subtract compassion and multiply possession
Empires of shareholders, make us all cannon folder
And when statistics dictates the usefulness of man
Blood is foaming over the invisible hand


The postwar is over, its postcard is warning
The dreams being sold and the futures foreclosed