A slow fire burns
in the temple of the world
and by the smallest turns
we are roasted as we are twirled
around a workaday spit
for someone else’s meal,
cooked however they see fit
to have their cannibal fill,
for we rarely sacrifice
as we did in days of old
when a virgin would suffice
in the ancient pagan hold—
a throat slit, a heart torn,
the blood of one’s firstborn.

Nowadays it is a subtle price
which the poor must always pay,
an odds and ends sacrifice
on every menial workday,
for life is made of dissected time
and our time is given to others—
to those willing to claw and to climb
up the heaped bodies of their brothers.
A little time sacrificed from a lot
to benefit only the wealthy few;
a little from which is thus bought
the Devil’ intractable due.
“The cost divided among so many
amounts to little,” they say, “if any.”

Yet, instead of notches on bone
we have notches on clocks;
instead of feudal seeds sown
we have dividends and stocks;
because many are slowly killed
in the dead-end, daily grind
to maximize the market yield
for the stockholder hivemind,
which is why the aristocrats
overwork others, and fire some,
just so their bloodline brats
can inherit a bigger kingdom.
The only way to insure your blood
is to make others toil in the mud.

Blood may not stain the chopping block,
but blood does sustain the gears,
lubricating the industrial clock
for machines throughout the years.
Paradise has always come with a cost
even in a world of cornucopias,
and our guilt will never be lost
in these ostensible utopias.
There is a reason the word “fire”
is used when terminating you,
because they are adding you to the pyre
of the unemployed, too.
A pink slip is the pagan mark
to light the wickerman’s spark.