The Ages of Man
The Ages of a Man were Seven;
Yet Businessmen, I’ve come to see,
Are limited at most to Three.
What Chairman you have known, in truth,
Went ‘mewling, puking’ in his youth?
Did Rupert Murdoch ever trail
To school ‘unwilling like a snail’ ?
What kind of regular Wall Street guy
Writes sonnets to his mistress’ eye?
Which banker, as implies the Bard,
Was ever ‘bearded like the pard’?
No! Business Man, we may deduce,
Leaps pin-striped from the head of Zeus,
Impatient for the business cycle
Before he’s slipped the umbilical !
Who’s got the time, where time’s the essence,
For infancy or adolescence,
Or other stages of gestation
So low in cash accumulation?
For him, the life the gods decree,
Is split, like Caesar’s Gaul, in Three.
FIRST, is the Henry Ford fixation –
Technology and Innovation:
In which our hero dreams that he
Will make it with his Model-T,
Leaping from garden-shed to mansion
By supra-national expansion;
With shareholders and media cheering
Such global feats of engineering.
AGE TWO unfolds when he perceives
That he who manufactures grieves;
All fixed investment is for fools
Obsessed with factories and tools;
Who, blind to bankruptcy’s seduction,
Erode their assets in Production.
No ! He who mainly has it made,
Is he who does not make, but trades;
Rich fortune, free of retribution,
Means Services and Distribution.
His THIRD – and transcendental – Phase
Reveals, at last, what truly pays;
The Bear that really scoops the Honey
Is not in Goods, or Trade – but Money !
And Banking is the life that best
Accumulates his Interest;
And soothes him to his final day,
Sans pain, sans risk – and with his ‘K’