The Bottom Coming?
by Leslie Fishman

Churning and churning in the widening ire
The trader cannot hear the investor;
Prices fall apart; the market cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the globe,
The blood dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The complacency of the bulls is drowned;
The longs lack all conviction, while the bears
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some capitulation is at hand;
Surely the bottom is at hand.
The Bottom Coming! Hardly are these words out
When a vast image out of the market's mind
Troubles my sight: somewhere on the bricks of the street
A shape with a bear body and head of a bull,
A gaze as blank and pitiless as Greenspan's
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant shorts.
The darkness drops again; but I now know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a falling market,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches toward Wall Street to be born.

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