In the kingdom of surplus, milk and honey drown the land,
Yet children curl in backseats, mothers bargain with the night;
Towers of opulence glitter, unmoved by an outstretched hand,
As millions fade into silence, erased by prosperity’s might.

A father barters hope for the graveyard shift,
His children’s laughter mortgaged for an hour’s sleep;
Triumph is clinging to one child as dreams drift—
Signed in silence, a contract only poverty keeps.

We marvel at gadgets, screen-lit faces aglow,
Cell phones in every palm, but futures already gone;
The blue shimmer of progress, a comfort so shallow,
While rent devours bread, and the darkness drags on.

Landlords reap double where the desperate sleep,
Slumlords flourish as justice averts its gaze;
A lease inked in hardship, a promise they never keep,
Eviction’s cold verdict, the market’s cruel praise.

At dawn in Appalachia, a girl hugs her knees for heat,
Her breath ghosts the air, lips cracked and turning blue;
She knots a fraying shoelace, no crumbs left to eat,
And dreams of a warm home, a world she never knew.

Pleas for fair treatment drowned in the factory’s roar;
Unions dismantled, wages vanish in thin air;
We bankroll the giants, trembling at their door,
And cheer the same systems grinding us into despair.

The poor pay more for everything they need—
A fee for their hunger, a toll for their pain;
Bankers and lenders in a carnival of greed,
Siphon hope from the many, enriching their reign.

Shame is a currency, minted by the state,
A welfare office, a cold bureaucrat’s glare;
The indigent made invisible, erased by debate,
Cast out from all nations, unwelcomed everywhere.

Liberty’s pulse flickers in the chill of profit’s chain,
Justice auctions virtue to the highest cutthroat bid;
The privileged weld their ramparts from dividends and disdain,
And bury the poor’s last gasp beneath progress’s gilded lid.

And so, in this empire of abundance and want,
We wonder at poverty’s stubborn, knotted root—
Not a flaw, but a feature, a shadow that haunts:
Some throats choked silent, so others can feast on fruit.