'La naturaleza y los mitos IV', by Yuyo Noé, 1975.

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Everything’s made of something else

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If you’ve got the cash, nothing’s off limits ‒
stainless steel palm trees, silicone fish, even robot dogs.
You know you’ve made it when you can buy everything fake,
made of anything except what it really is.
The rest of us have to make do with real live trees,
flesh and blood fish, proper dogs that
bark all the time at nothing much:
real and fake’s what keeps the haves
from the have nots.
It’s not just shiny add-ons, either.
The whole shebang needs some of us
to stay in a made-up bubble,
and some of us to stay stuck under
the boss man’s bona fide iron thumb.
You can see it out on the streets ‒
places where money runs like water,
they don’t have to worry about how smooth the roads are,
how strong the steel is, whether the windows gleam
enough in the midday sun,
cos there’s always the hottest apartment,
the latest place to hang out,
the newest nightspot,
popping up out of thin air.
But where money’s tight, everything’s so real
you can see the cracks in the concrete,
the potholes in the bitumen,
the overgrown grass in the yards ‒
cos it’s always the same houses,
roads, shops, faces, places,
long after the last old-timer’s moved on.
Even war’s just another shot on your big screen
if you can afford to live far away from the bullets
and bombs, but they’ll kill you in a heartbeat
if there’s nowhere else to go.
So, when they moan it’s all too mass-produced,
not human enough,
remember the fault lines keeping us apart ‒
not everyone can afford to fuss about how
fake everything is cos they have to live
in a world that’s way too real to treat like you can
just use it all up, throw it away,
buy another one ‒ just like everything else.
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