poem: Candy for the Bankrupt

Candy for the Bankrupt

Our cherished institutions fell, slammed to the ground
As their tickers were ripped from The Street.
CEOs levitated, employees got smacked down.
September's found its own trick-or-treat.

After life-long lupus, the corpus of capitalism
Coughed out its lungs to the ditch.
Limp, in a pox-ridden Indian blanket,
It cried for the Wicked Witch.

Tom Jefferson, Ben Franklin, Francis Scott Key
Would not understand our land of the free,
Strangled by loopholes and bloated budgets,
Insured from neck to knee.

We've deployed our teens, even parents with children
To chase wild terrorists to distant dens.
And we wave flags at home, in the Nazi tradition.
Nationalism will cow once-brave citizens.

Our national debt bubbles past ten trillions −
Lots of pork, grist, and eye of newt.
We'll eat spun crow and like it; lobby legions
Have double-doubled our mandrake root.

Now, when even children are growing up obese,
Eating trans fats, sugars and wheat,
We dress them like demons in eye-slaying colors
And tell them to go trick-or-treat.

There's nothing of value in a sub-prime mortgage
Or the fast track down the tubes.
All those candy highs are rendering us bankrupt,
A nation of glazed-over boobs.

                          -- Leslie G. Harper
                              September 26, 2008