Poem "The Fable of the Bees"

“The Fable of the Bees”

But don’t the lawyers need crime?
And doesn’t shopping kill time?

The colony will collapse
If we fall into altruistic traps

First we had the tribe
Then the church beat us to subscribe
As an act of defiance
Now we have science
That frees us from the tyranny of religion
Less spiritual, it’s a more material place we live in

But we build things
Useless things
And consumption quells
The god-sized hole that swells
In our hearts
Because we get advertising darts
Bullseyes to the brain
These musings on the sacred mundane
Or did the “c” and the “a” switch?
And now we’re just scared capitalists?
We used to have markets with people and scenes
Now we silently just push buttons on screens
How do we remember our creative maker production roots?
And that we didn’t always live with disposable suits and boots?

Sacred shopping
Holy bar hopping
Drinking to get buzzed
Or maybe just to forget about a life that once was
That dream deferred
Those visions blurred
How can we unite in this fight to see ourselves than more
Than the consumer identity we’ve been programmed with long before
We let go of our aspirations
To thrive on a planet post-nations
Post-currency
I have to believe
That one of the reasons we got here
Is because of The Fable of the Bees