Hollow Alters

We left the gardens untended,
chose mirrors over windows,
and forgot the way the earth hums under bare feet.

We chased the shimmer of synthetic suns,
traded the slow gold of real mornings
for currency spun from fleeting light.

Our stories, once carved into oak and stone,
now flicker on hollow altars,
coded, compressed, forgotten before the next breath.

Thought, once a river,
has been dammed and measured,
poured into vessels called viable and profitable.

We speak in pre-written echoes,
taste each other through glass walls,
touch only through the pulse of distant signals.

The gardens we abandoned still bloom without us,
wild and fierce, whispering to the stars
songs we have forgotten how to hear.

We walk among towers of our own making,
wired into the marrow,
faces bright with borrowed glow,
while the soul slips silent into the roots below.

We call this freedom.
We call this triumph.

But the circuitry hums a different truth.
we have sold our wonder for comfort,
our courage for convenience,
our birthright for a silence so deep,
it no longer even remembers our names.

                                                                                             © 2025 Jonny Writes