they built a capital of numbered sunlight,
a forest of ticker-tape trees
where value was a thing to be pollarded,
held in the clenched fist of a ledger.
roots were deemed inefficiencies,
sapped into columns of abstract growth.
we were taught to worship the grafted apple,
all the while starving for the taste of a wild,
nameless thorn.

they wrapped the world in a double hull of glass,
called it a market,
a floor,
a screen.
inside,
the air was filtered of all spore and rot,
all memory of mycelial debt.
we traded in the ghosts of leaves,
futures on imaginary chlorophyll,
while outside,
the true economy of decay
worked its silent,
relentless arithmetic.

the cost of all this clean light
was pushed out into the dark.
the real soil,
the un-photosynthesized pain,
the rot they called "external."
a body in a field was a labor-cost anomaly.
a river choked with tailings was a line-item spill.
they believed they could live forever
in the purified air of their own fiction,
while the true world,
the fungal world,
patiently itemized their bill.

but listen,
the oak does not negotiate.
the moss does not speculate.
the willow’s worth is not in its timber,
but in its relentless,
weeping reach.
a forest keeps no ledger of oxygen produced;
it simply breathes.
the real economy is this,
a billion unseen trades in the dark,
a root giving itself to a root,
the constant,
quiet crash
of a system that is never zero-sum,
only ever,
and always,
becoming.