His hands held nothing—neither tool nor trade,
No callus from the grinding of the wheel.
He slipped the yoke the rest of them obeyed;
They called him mad, for he refused to kneel.

The butcher, baker, banker—thin as smoke—
Hunched over ledgers, bound by toil—blind.
Their smiles were merchandise; their laughter broke,
Lost from the body—orphans of the mind.

They called it living: work, covet, comply—
Acquire, expire, profit without end.
But only he could see where all roads lie:
In graves they’d dug, too deep to comprehend.

One midnight when the churchyard’s frozen earth
Began to tremble, crack, and heave, and sigh,
The dead rose—not in sorrow, but in mirth,
Unbound, aflame, and dancing in death’s eye.

A spirit came to him with open hands,
More real than any flesh he’d touched or known.
She owed no debt, obeyed no lord’s commands—
Pure joy and presence, feral, all her own.

Below, the city choked upon its sprawl,
Its chimneys breathing soot to blind the sky,
Its people coffined upright, wall to wall,
Their hearts embalmed before they learned to die.

A lock gave way—a hinge inside his chest.
He could not tell if he had died or woke.
His fists uncurled. He exhaled all the rest.
The world’s old sentence in his blood revoked.

And then that world of smoke and debt collapsed.
The wheel was still; the furnace fire grew cold.
The ledgers shut, the grinding years elapsed—
He walked among the dead—and was made whole.