The City of Glass

Who are these children?  Those that came to rise
When the curtain of the millennium fell.
The cracks that break in the carnelian mold
Reveal an ancient force all too familiar,
Its reign truncated by the revolution of the 80s.
Mottled faces that designate the coordinates
Of an atlas extracted from an accountant’s matrix
Construct the cyber skyscrapers of the Internet boom
Which gave to us the keys of fantasy.
Gluttony, bearing down on the financial frontier,
Has put them on the brink of regression,
But they’ll never know it until the hurricane hits,
Until the American Dream confronts the reality
That designed it.  Sloth, galvanized by television and computers,
But most importantly the free market bubble
That turned working men into casual Kings
Seeking meaning after the failure of Generation X,
Became a mantra for those lost orphans
That now scream through the obsidian glass,
Bound to the network with no chance of escape.
The system enhances our inheritance,
Fattening us up for the feeding after the crash.
When it all goes under, it won’t be the chosen ones who survive,
But the ones who remember how the cycle works.