a crown,
a monarch is just a loop of gold,
a brain trained to the same protocol;
decrees like code,
the throne on rails,
while beggars starve outside the walls.
the crown is a broken record.
a monarch is just a meat puppet
strung up on gold-plated wires;
every decree another line
of faulty code,
executed by trembling hands
click.
the king reviews his laws.
click.
the stocks rise as designed.
no grief, no guilt;
just input, output.
a hollow man for hollow times.
click.
another dissident disappears.
click.
another child's lungs fill with factory smoke.
the throne room stinks of sanitized blood,
and the peasants?
still starving,
still statistically insignificant.

buddha exiled himself.
he walked out,
left silk,
left swords,
left the click-click of the court.
no more taxes,
no more wars,
just a tree,
a breath,
a thought.
buddha was the first system crash.
he spat out the royal firmware,
tore the crown from his own skull,
left the kingdom to its click-click death spiral
and walked barefoot into the dirt.

but we?
we stay,
we grind,
we fixate.
we kneel to gods of productivity.
the system buzzes and hums,
enlightenment!
enlightenment!
enlightenment!
is just another efficiency.

capitalism is just an
autistic machine with guns.
ten thousand hours in the cage?
here's your "genius" certificate,
printed on the back of a dead worker's
paystub.

"hustle" means "bleed quietly."
"grind" means "dig your own grave deeper."
the ceo's fourth yacht has a name,
"collateral damage" written in orphan bones.
ten thousand hours in the cage,
they call it "genius,"
call it "skill,"
call it "success."
the warehouse worker’s broken back?
a rounding error in the math.

hustle,
grind, and optimize.
the screens all chant it,
bright and cheap.
meanwhile,
the ceo’s third yacht
is just a line item;
"don’t weep."

i will not be a click,
a scroll,
a data point,
a metric’s toll.
i’ll glitch the code,
i’ll stall the gears,
i’ll laugh too loud,
i’ll waste my years.

come,
let’s be feral,
let’s be vain,
let’s burn their graphs,
let’s break their chains.
the system feeds on ordered
and fixated minds,
so rot the wires.
go offline.

they’ll call us mad,
discard our names,
but madness is the price we pay
to keep one spark they can’t program,
the right to lose our way.