It Rules

Once religion ruled
And the world had it bad.
It made it all worth more
And gave us the answer
We'd fervently been searching for.
It gave us a reason,
To be human. To be just.
It gave us a reason
To do more than lie in the dust.
It made us all feel secure
With the knowledge that the good,
The pure,
Would remain so forever.
If the foundations ever shook,
Or if our morals went askew
We looked no further than the book.
We lied ourselves to sleep
At night
Told ourselves it was all
Just good and bad,
Black and white.
But eventually the pressure grew
And our saviour became
Our self-designed oppressor.
Sans our God
Without our reason
The wars seemed harder,
Work seemed foolish;
Life seemed stranger now
Than ever.
And death grew bleaker
As our beliefs grew weaker
And we healed from the curse
Of our religion:
Truly, we were at our worst.
What are we here for?
O! What terror flooded us
And finally we understood:
There was no grander plan,
No point.
It was living without a hood,
Work; sleep; eat and
Pass away.
But now without fear
Of religious retribution
We discovered the joys and thrills
Of fearless pleasure!
And yet the mutual delusion
Had been the bonds
Keeping us together.
We needed something new
To fill the emptiness that grew.
And instead of God
Another leader.
The restrictions of class and coin
That we choose to interpret
As our coveted freedom.
That ideal of being who you are
Draw out by the value of
The things you buy.
The dream of being 'rich' enough
To live beyond that lower-class life.
And what a monster
It spawned;
Now there is no virtue
That exists outside our heinous greed
Our excess needs.
Now there is a worship
Of money and class-value.
We follow these routines
Like beasts- all 'me'
No 'you'.
So now we go around,
Willing
To pit our fallen grace against our growing greed.
All we have now
Is surplus to what 'we' need.
So we feed
Our hideous little urchins
In as best ways as we can
Its too much; they use it
Like a crutch
And somehow we labour over how
They've grown
Only to know whats in their hands.
Now there is the screen.
And it rules.
We're plugged into its cables
And we gape as we admire
Its many false jewels.
The pixels are a void
But they're our source of pleasure;
Amusement; news,
Like treasure
They cost more and more
For less and less
As demand grows and
We regress.
From caves to stone tablets
To parchment; parchment
To paper.
From paper to keyboard,
And back to our tablets.
Only this time,
We're destroying the Earth as we go...
But we know, O! We know!
We understand the damage,
The harm done over time.
But there's still money to consider:
The one thing,
The only thing
Every single person considers
"Mine."