Fiscal Alienation

There are businesses which deal with products, grown, made, created, and those who deal with services. But it seems that the traders in currencies, buying and selling, are not really either - they make their money at a step removed from the real world, which is probably why they regard wealth creation as a success, and are existentially removed from the peoples whose lives the fluctuations in currency affect. They neither reap, not to they sow, except that they reap fortunes and sow misery. 

In some respects this alienation has become part of our  lives anyway. We don't kill our own meat - we have slaughter houses and butchers to remove the meat which we see for sale from the creature it came from. We push death away into care homes, and many people never see a dead body, something a previous century would have been familiar with. We are, as the existentialists and psychotherapists tell us, alienated from the real world. Why else would it be that farmers, who produce essential food, struggle to make ends meat, while CEOs of large companies, even when failing, have earnings that Croesus would envy.


This poem is about fiscal alienation in particular.

Fiscal Alienation

Money men, we dabble in the market
Like magicians, we take a shining coin
Sell here, buy here, take the basket
And with greed alone enjoin

The common people, the often poor
In the gutter, economics of trickle down
Eating stale crumbs upon the floor
Super rich celebrate upon the town

Detachment: figures on a balance sheet
When speculation is in money alone
Exchange rates plummet, such a cheat
Just ask for bread, and get a stone

Pity the disconnected world in which we live
When judgement comes, who will forgive?