The Litany

It’s the Age
of Quantity
the Economist
rules the roost

works so very
ardently
to give his
phony arts
a boost

knows the Price
of everything
but Values not
at all

Capital’s
choice handmaiden
at his Master’s
beck and call

doughty prize-fighter
apologist for hire
earns his errant
Nobel Prize
preaching louder
than the choir

*

Devil take
the hindmost
runs the dull
refrain

here there and
everywhere
spreads his Litany
of Gain

disdains with
specious models
all benevolence
and care

touting
race to the
fittest
under rule
of laissez faire

*

A set of shrewd
assumptions
self-limits
what he finds

sadly dupes
the hoi polloi
with dusty rusty
minds

masks nursery
idiotics
with equations
and the like

few daring to
say to him
‘inveigler
take a ____’

*

Quite
ineffably
less errant fool
than knave

to stand up
to his wiles
need be
principled
and brave

‘iron law of wages’
‘law of population’
long tricked us
one and all

but his age now
is withering
Writing’s on
the Wall

*

We are mutualist
communals
reciprocal at
heart

a pox on his
rank corruptions
and a plague on his
science and art

 
[©R.Kanth 2023]

Professor Rajani Kanth, is Author of Coda (A Novel), A Day in the Life (Novel), Expiations (Verse), and Farewell to Modernism (Political Economy Tract).