by Cole McNamara / perilpoet

Money runs our lives like a rigged spell—
paper scraps and pixel dust.

It is not real.
What’s real is breath in your chest, soup on your stove, the way the sky belongs to everyone.
We are already rich.
But this green lie tells us we are poor, tells us to beg, to grind, to fear,
and we believe it.

Look at the dollar they swear is harmless.
“No pyramids in the U.S.”
Then why is there one in your wallet?
All-seeing eye staring back,
Novus Ordo Seclorum hissing under its breath.
Thirteen steps. Thirteen stars. Thirteen stripes.
Thirteen leaves, berries, arrows.
Thirteen, thirteen, thirteen—
not an accident. A New World Order.

Epstein’s ghost smirking through Jackson’s face,
the global elite hiding in plain sight
while we fight each other for scraps.

They want us divided, exhausted, convinced
that our worth lives in numbers and ink.

But money is just a cage made of symbols.
We are the ones who agreed it was real.
We can also be the ones who remember:

The wealth is not in the bill.
It’s in the soul that refuses
to bow to it.

If you like this piece, you might also enjoy:

• Priority List — a Ruin poem for anyone sick of watching ordinary people get punished while the powerful erase their names from the record.
• This Land Was Made For You and Me — a Ruin poem that twists a familiar patriotic refrain into a sharp critique of pied politicians, hollow patriotism, and a country claimed by ego.