NEW GODS of technology

    you make no apology.

INNOCENT PLASTIC shiny metal

    we created you to be

a harmless tool with grand potential

    blind to a fault we failed to see.

BELOW IN COOL deception

    hunger fed a baser need

seized by novel attraction

    awakened so our social greed.

WILL THE GOOD ever equal

    your vain and clever evil?

YOU ARE LIKE those ancient idols

    ruling above their hapless makers

carved and cast in gold,

    you in texts and tweets and videos.

EAR BUDS ENTOMB in sound

    casting silence all around

eyeballs stuck on slick distractions

    always blindly aiming down.

YOU DUMB and deaden

    numb and leaden.

EYE-CANDIED games of chance and choice

    bring relished death and violent voice,

altering reality in a realm so thrilling

    with wave after wave of habitual killing.

LOST IN VISIONS of empty power,

    hour after hour after hour after hour,

 once promised to bring us cheer

    now threaten compulsive fear.

AND SO, the endless needing

    held in desperate waiting

for life-sustaining friending

    what if it doesn’t come?

IT DOESN’T come

    doesn’t come.

AND EVEN WHEN IT DOES,

    we hurry to count our friends

wallowing in the never-satisfying sum.

WORSHIPING while walking

    obediently bowing.

HOLDING us in captive hands

    cuffed to starving souls,

following new gods with new demands,

    listening to whispered commands,

going blank and blanker,

    whenever    wherever    forever.

THESE NEW IDOLS like the old

    cost a deadly price,

what came from human handiwork

    calls for human sacrifice.

SO MANY RICHES we so wished

    to end now so impoverished.