Written On Spec Poem by gershon hepner

The poems that I write are mainly jesters
I pull out of my hat and write on spec
just like those mansions built by rich investors
whose fortune comes from what they build or wreck.
Developers build in sagas of excess
on sites where profitably they demolish,
while, not for profit, I with scant success,
build on fresh air the poems that I polish.
I do it to amuse myself, and hope-
fully my readers will invest their time
in reading them just like a horoscope,
for I predict reliably in rhyme
not fall of presidents or market trends,
but that my jesters will cause them to smile
before the moment that my poem ends,
and make them feel that life can be worthwhile.

Inspired by an article in the New Yorker, August 25,2008 by Nick Paumgarten (“A Greenwich of the Mind”) describing the mansions built on spec in a saga of excess in Greenwich, Connecticut:

And each season seems to bring a saga of excess. Over the past fifteen years or so, Greenwich has effectively become the capital of the hedge-fund world. Firms large and small have settled there, as have their employees, many of them, thanks to their lucrative fee structure, earners of tens or hundreds of millions of dollars a year. That kind of money can change a place, even one as accustomed to big wealth as Greenwich. The town experienced a frenzy of buying, selling, subdividing, demolishing, constructing, renovating and recriminating that altered its landscape and reputation, if not quite its self-image...The outrage is perennial. The town’s vestigial claims to dignity and discretion––rooted as much in furtive fortune preservation as in any kind of righteous Yankee providence––is at odds with its feverish wealth, past and present.


8/21/08