Spread All Around

Money and work, ending on service. The title comes from the song’s bluntest poem: money, like shit, stinks when piled up but grows food when spread all around. The first third is money’s contradictions — what it buys, what it can’t, the poet who writes for it and earns nothing but contempt. The middle is the economy’s absurdities: bottled water, peanuts and monkeys, petty thieves jailed and great ones elected. Then work — finishing, quitting, the unfinished task that haunts all the others, three early mornings that add up to an extra half a day. The last haiga give the answer the song was building toward: the only life worth living is the one spent helping others.