Nobody writes poetry about financial security

We paid the mortgage a week late but the bank said it wasn't a problem, that
things happen but to not get used to the slack - We needed the extra time
to clear out the beginning of a fire ant infestation that wasn't a swarm yet
but that might be later, and what with the holiday barbecue and the pre-school payments
it slipped off our radar until we got a phone call, a polite one, reminding us that
our house wasn't ours yet and that the money we weren't spending on rent
had other coffers to be in. I cut a check.

Our jobs don't beat us down anymore, not since they realized how
much they lean on us and the pressure to prove ourselves
has subsided to a background hum, less a state of being and
more of a suspension, that the we that we are at work and
the we that we are at home are becoming less disparate,
our affects blending into identities. We're ourselves more often than ever now.

We go out some nights, leave the kid with his grandmother,
and stay in others, allowing the movie-light to flicker us to sleep.
We don't have the time for television, but from what we've seen
it doesn't really have the time for us, either, pandering to
teenagers, trying to get them to work their way through
their parents' expendable income. We're not offended or insulted,
but we certainly can't be bothered.

When Christmas comes, when our families pull us in different directions,
we'll hunker down and hope for weather, the kind of weather that reminds you
that we won't have to mow the lawn until the snow melts at the very earliest
and that the inside limit was days away,
hidden behind viciously rattling windows, fighting with all their might
to keep us introspective. We'd curl up in the living room,
watch the game, dip bread into soup and under blankets, all homemade and warm,
and toast the end of credit card debt and college loans and car payments
and start reinvesting in each other.

We've learned languidity, stopped writing poetry, started thinking in prose.

I wrote this many years ago. It's rather negative, so I'm not expecting a lot of love for this =) Anyway...

Ode to Milton Friedman

How does it feel to be loved by tyrants?
How does it feel to enslave your fellow man?
How does it feel, O Wise Milton Friedman
To think the things that only Your Highness can?

Prodigal son of the nation
O you'll go down in history
As The Man Who Beat Inflation
Through joblessness and poverty

How does it feel to excuse oppression?
How does it feel to dash the hopes of the poor?
How does it feel, O Great Milton Friedman
Idiot of Twentieth Century Lore?

Ah sado-monetarism
That thin grasp of reality
Lowering prices of goods by
Making sure we have no money*

How does it feel, tell me how does it feel
To sully the name of the Chicago School?
How does it feel, O Famed Milton Friedman
To be remembered as last century's fool?

(Repeat and fade)
How does it feel, tell me how does it feel?
How does it feel, yeah tell me how does it feel?
How does it feel, O Proud Milton Friedman?
Tell me baby, just tell me, how does it feel?

The society which scorns excellence in plumbing as a humble activity and tolerates shoddiness in economics because it is an exalted activity will have neither good plumbing nor good economics ... Neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water.
-(with apologies to John W. Gardner)

*Less money chasing more goods does indeed keep inflation in check. However, there are two aspects to this observation. Either you concentrate on making sure there's less money, or you concentrate on making sure there are more goods. And what kind of goods are we talking about? See Demand is not measured in units of people, it is measured in units of money