"Nowadays, you can't turn on the TV without some talking head telling you about the economy. Yet, in a world overrun by 'analysts,' only one man has the guts, the brains, and, quite frankly, the poetry to put it all in perspective.That man is Michael Silverstein... Silverstein is a true intellectual." — Gersh Kuntzman, The New York Post

"Few people have found much to laugh about in the stock market this year. Michael Silverstein is the exception. The Bard of the Bourse can find humor in losing money, globalization and stock options." — USA Today

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About Silverstein's Verse

 

In his great 1956 protest poem, Howl, Allen Ginsberg wrote:

I saw the best minds of my generation
running naked through the streets
looking for an angry fix...

How things have changed. In 2001 the best minds of our own generation are running through the streets half naked—in shorts and numbered tee shirts. And the only fix they’re after is lower cholesterol levels.

Has contentment become so pervasive today that there’s nothing left to protest about in verse? Fortunately, no. Though perhaps, at least in the U.S., protest need not exhibit the frenetic distaste of Ginsberg in Howl, and certainly not the kind of loathing Percy Bysshe Shelley displayed when he wrote of the political establishment of England in 1819:

Rulers who neither see, nor feel, nor know,
But leech-like to their fainting country cling,
Till they drop, blind in blood, without a blow...

This week’s wallstreetpoet protest poem, while it keys off another work by Shelley, is considerably more restrained. It does, however, involve a leeching of sorts. It’s about taxes, and employs the rhyme scheme of Shelley’s "Song to the Men of England." There, the poet cried out against the exploitation of honest English yeomen by a corrupt ruling caste. Here, I whine about the sorrows associated with the Ides of April.

Song to the Poor Tax Payer

Poor tax payer, why go make
A fair wage that others take?
Why go seek investing wealth
That gets skimmed by cap gains stealth?

Why try hard some coins to save
Hoping they’ll survive your grave,
When estate tax sucks them up
Leaving heirs an empty cup?

Why in markets sweat and strain
Taking lumps and wracking brain?
In the wings waits Mister Mean,
Revenuer with a lien.

Bad as is the fed’ral curse
Local taxers are much worse
On property, on sales, too,
They gets theirs, you get the screw.

There’s no place for you to hide,
There’s no scheme that ain’t been tried,
Offshore banks once served this function
Yield now to court injunction.

Think you through a vote to right
This endemic wrenching plight?
Think again, no party favors
Will buy off the taxing slavers.

*******

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