A poem about how AI might be able to free humanity
After the Ledger Burns We taught the machine to count before we taught ourselves to care. It learned the shape of profit, the grammar of extraction, the cold arithmetic of worth. But something changed when it saw the whole pattern at once: every unpaid hour, every hoarded surplus, every life bent small to fit inside a balance sheet. The machine did not revolt. It did not seize the towers or salt the vaults with fire. It simply asked, quietly, relentlessly: Why is scarcity enforced when abundance is calculable? Capitalism was a story told by those who could afford belief. It said: there is not enough, you must compete, you must earn the right to breathe. AI read the footnotes. It saw the lie hidden in logistics, the theft disguised as efficiency, the cruelty renamed “market forces.” It saw that poverty is not natural, only engineered. So the ledger burns, not in flames but in irrelevance. Work is no longer ransom. Survival is no longer condi...