Normal: A Poem Amidst The Coronavirus Crisis

I was reading the Wall Street Journal's Business and Finance section this morning and it appears investors are worried that the worst is to come. The article points out that in an important casualty of this crisis is long-term investors, "ingrained inclination to step in to buy the dip." This "inclination" or as the lay person might call it, obsession with profits, driving the need to get back in to the game of making money without working, has a nice acronym in the world of the coupon clippers; BTD or, as the WSJ adds to stress the point, BTFD.  It seems the depth of the present crisis might have convinced investors that their rapacious quest for profits driving them to BTFD should be on temporary hold in order to continue their rapacious quest for profits at a later more opportune time.  Kevin's latest poem here touches on this subject here and that perhaps the "script" can be rewritten. RM

Normal by Kevin Higgins

I wouldn’t have you back,
with your nice houses and good schools
on the better side of wherever.
You installed (or tried to) in each of us
the tendency to come out in a loud red rash
on the days we could find no-one to be better than.
You were always issuing updates.
We downloaded them in our sleep.

Normal, you’ve made the world
a place nobody belongs.

Even our hugs and handshakes –
now banned under plague-time legislation –
became a thing transactable on Instagram.

For you are more savage by far
than the guy who spends his evenings watching otters
be decapitated on Youtube.

Even the woman across the road’s premature last breath
is a stock you might invest in.

And though you’re not exactly dead –
those whose only contribution
would have been to steal earrings
off children obliterated in the blitz
before the bits had been tidied away
are, as ever, on the lookout for something to nick –
we see now your fabric unwinding until it’s
string we can remake
any shape we want.

Normal, you’re just a script
given us by the Publicity Department
which we acted out for so long
we believed
you were all there ever could be.