Black eyed freedom sat on a funeral pyre, preaching of custom and loss; his hands yellow with disease, lips crackling like burning pinecones, the sap oozing forth in slow death. His tattered hair and disheveled cloth hung limpid on his skeletal frame and vanished first before the torch.
Pot bellied greed laughed a deep laugh, as an arrogant man laughs when he has strangled a mouse or stamped out a revolution of starving men with an army of well fed, well armed, ignorance. He wore a regal ring on his plump finger, and as the pallbearers escorted the ashes from the land, they paused to kiss the gem, bowing low in obeisance before cheerfully continuing with their task.
Green eyed Mammon laughed too, clutching trembling democracy to his breast while he paraded goodwill shivering in its cage. He stood on the third world, and every time he squeezed his toes, a diamond came out, glistening in the sun with the sweat of a thousand ‘lesser’ men.
Humanity stood bound in a choke collar, his hand tightening the chain, his own blind sorrow ignored by his heart and his feet bound in the concrete shackles of ritual. Every time he tried to walk his swollen ankles lead in different directions and he fell blushing on his face. Sometimes he managed to walk in circles.
The ashes of freedom were spread in the badlands, but before the henchmen had scarce turned away, the wind gathered them in and carried them throughout the earth, scattering the small pieces in the hearts of men, wherein they would sometimes sprout and displace the poison roots of greed. Then a voice calling for the release of goodwill; a voice calling for self bound humanity to relinquish the bloody leash of usury; a voice ignored, tormented, slaughtered; a voice unbreakable; a voice of freedom.
