The Poetry of Economics

This blog site has promised you occasional bad poetry. There isn't a lot of poetry about economics, probably for good reason. I have written two poems on the subject. In honor of the current dustup in Washington about tax cuts and the deficit, here you go:

                                                        Economics

The wealth of the world

wants to flow downhill.

Dammed in high places,

it puddles into great pools

of things—ponds of

necklaces, reservoirs

of the big-engined

and the indigo,

manmade lakes

of fashionable

commodities.

But wealth beats hard

against the dams,

wears them away,

looks for cracks in

the great masses of concrete.

Gravity favors the poor.

 The Bottom Line

 

“Enough,” he said, “is enough.”

And all the receipts fell from the trees

And a billion billion bills came due

And what we wore grew dingy on our knees

And our buttons dropped to the floor

Among the toys

Among the cracked temporary necessities

Among the miserably high-priced shoes—

And yes, stupidly, the socks—

And the shocking electronic boxes of lights

And the noise

And the music music music that was almost noise.

And he didn’t need to say it again

But he did: “Enough!

It’s enough.”

And he tore out his tubes

Because

From mountains of things

To oceans of things

To prairies of anything,

Nothing grew—it only

Accumulated.

And your hands

Were in my family’s pockets

Taking more than our dirty little change

(But what was that?),

Leaving leafless our accounts

And our few hours empty

Of anything approaching an eleemosynary twinkle.

And so our smiles, like yours, became just teeth,

And we all bit:

On the red want,

On the white wish,

And on the wild blue greed.