Head-Hunting Hedge-Fund Hawk Poem by C Richard Miles

And still the struggling heart
Of the tainted metropolis
Ticked on regardless.
Insentient to the wounds that gaped,
Not caused by raptor’s pounce
But self-inflicted deep
On its once-burnished,
Impenetrable carapace.
Lanced deep through mass redundancy
To purge the pus of greed
And over-indulgence.
With a thousand job-cuts
Carving deep into its fundament,
The injured insect limped
Insistent, as before
That sheer inertia will pull it through
And that the modernising charlatans
Will not prevail,
Its pulse persisting with a constant throb
Staunchly, despite its blood-loss
And reduction of its limbs
To severed stumps,
Thrusting heedlessly now,
The headless cockroach of the city
Slewed unstoppably on to oblivion,
Oblivious to the hawk of failure
Hidden by the hedge-fund,
Hovering, alert and poised to stoop,
Inevitably, to seize its prey.