Tempered in the fires of society
you’ve been kept in line
within the confines
that they’ll allow
between their predefined
thresholds of deviation
Anything less or more
is left to be moored
by the police-authority

Because you wouldn’t play their game
you refused to pursue
their evangelical
greed for the purse, the money
the proposal of the self
before anything else
You’d rather burn Wall Street
than to walk it in stride
alongside the “apex” life
with an all-too-socialized bride

What? You think your’re original?
That Greek gem,
The Roman puppy,
Your favorite contemporary
have all done this already
You’re stuck sucking from their teat
You just take in their art
process it on a whim
then shit it out with your own
petty pseudo-witty veneer

You’ve let them contain you
in this transparent cage
though less like the diamond you’d prefer
and more like the glass ceiling you’d defer
right back to those who created it
from their palaces up on the hill
they look down without
seeing those they forced supplicant
living in blissful ignorance

We could burn the hill down
melt this rustic cage
if only I could escape this maze
this amaranthine labyrinth
that’s so tragically beautiful
the way it captures my gaze
soon to spit me out
from within its spinneret
in being and mind, wholly new
as a zombie like all of you