They pay us cash to tell them in the dark

Some things they like to hear but may not need,

Such empty things to which they like to hark;

For others’ lives are foods on which to feed

A hunger for the light in which these move:

The fictions every day bombarding us

With lives to which we take our own to prove

Our worth or worthlessness, whose susurrus

We take as grasped truth.  And though we found

Our blindness with an eye that cannot see,

And used our clouded minds to think around

The thick, impeding dark, we aren’t free

From any thoughts we’ve made, but trapped therein,

For fictions are to authors next of kin.