Corporate Lust

By Chelsea Brown

Kill your old gods; replace them with machines!

Gasoline pools behind shining, golden grins.

Faith alone won’t save you from The Rapture, so dig deep underground,

Among corpses and debris,

The rubble left behind from a forgotten war.

When the Earth inevitably stops turning, they will still remain:

An unspoken treaty between the stars and our forefathers,

Signed in evangelical ink. 

But a God bound to oil is no God at all,

Just a figurehead with a beer-belly and tall top hat.

A man-sized vulture who cowers in his nest,

Counting crumpled bills beneath his talons.

His holiness bleeds out upon a cross made of gold,

Trickling into the mouths of his loyal consumers.

The taste wavers on their tongue like a song nobody remembers

Reminiscent of life before steam clouded the sky.