Howl for the Trade-Bound Nation

I saw the best economies devoured by their own hunger, ravenous for silicon and steel,
who paced boardrooms lit by the flicker of Bloomberg terminals, drowning in spreadsheets of deficit,
who bartered wheat for microchips, oil for lithium dreams, while the ghost of Detroit wailed in the smog,
who choked on the smolder of tariffs, their throats raw from shouting numbers into the void—
cash-register hearts ticking, ticking, ticking toward the cliff of infinite want.

What sphinx of debt rises from NASDAQ screens to unravel their algorithms?
Whose fingerprints stain the treaties, the sanctions, the hollow pacts signed in marble lobbies?
America, your factories are cathedrals of rust now, your workers apostles of the forgotten shift,
their hands still twitching with the memory of wrenches, their pensions dissolved into offshore mist.

Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of container ships! Moloch whose ports are gullets!
Moloch whose cranes claw the sky, whose algorithms suck the marrow from Manila, from Shenzhen!
Robot god! Your AI tendrils strangle the last sweat from flesh—O, the Bangladeshi seamstress,
the Congolese miner, the Texan roughneck, all chained to your binary hymn!

I stand in the shadow of your Wall Street ziggurats, where brokers scream into iPhones,
their souls mortgaged to the yuan’s whims, their briefcases stuffed with phantom bonds—
while the Midwest drowns in soybeans unsold, in milk poured black into the dirt,
and the Silicon saviors code faster, faster, building firewalls against the coming crash.

Who plunged into the dark web’s labyrinth, chasing crypto-mirage?
Who sold their birthright for a Tesla, a lithium battery humming with Bolivian tears?
Who kissed the drone’s cold lens, who wired the bomb with a Made-in-China chip?

The gears grind on. The pipelines bleed. The Gulf’s slicked wings beat in the junk-bond wind.
And the President tweets through the apocalypse, a carnival barker of the damned,
while TikTok prophets scroll, numb, through the end of days.

America, this is the reckoning. Your hunger birthed a hydra—one head in Brussels,
one in Beijing, one gnawing at your own liver. The dollar’s hymn fades to static,
a whisper of what thrived when the world was your orchard, your quarry, your whore.

Now the satellites watch. The blockchain ledgers never forget. The supply chain snaps
like a noose. And the children of the Anthropocene dream in degrees Celsius,
their futures traded short on the Nasdaq of extinction.

For Carl Solomon, who saw the gears. For the dockworker. For the melting ice caps.
For the phantom assembly lines. Howl, howl against the silence of the spreadsheet.