The lords have returned in their
time machine, wearing different skins,
silk ties or designer clothes instead of ermine,
their castles now of glass and algorithms,
and their moats the laws, capital and abstractions
that protect their growing interests,
moving from one form of enclosure to another.

And we, the tenants and serfs still,
bend and sweat across the same tired soil,
feeding the insatiable machine with
its great iron mouth that craves
more.

They have built a thresher
that separates the living from prosperity,
that gives just enough bread
to keep the machine going,
making injustice appear normal,
efficient, and even virtuous,
and calling it growth.

The feudal wheel turns digital now,
the manor house is offshore,
the serf’s yoke is a debt
worn so long it cuts to the bone.

And everywhere a child
eats less
so a ledger can eat more
for the few who make mansions
in the heavens above,
and fly above the congested traffic
of the everyday,
and call it the will of the only true god,
profits.

We must return in our time machine
to the common field,
to the ordinary sky
of everyone and no none under which
there is no overlord, and
drag the plough away
from the profit-loss machines,
and dig up what is buried beneath
normalcy in disguise,
and plant in truth again,
plant what feeds the good:
grow the common,
ordinary,
everyday,
dignities of having enough
for all to prosper.

But here is the complicity we hide from ourselves:
the serf dreams not of freedom but of the manor,
intoxicated by its alchemy,
flying above the peers that look to the sky,
calling it ambition, calling it arrival.

 

8/4/2026