I'd love to go back to a 2004 cocktail party and beat those sure-sounding real estate idiot optimists to death with a For Sale sign. I'd take a good whack at myself, too, because while I suspect that housing prices will eventually bounce back (five years? ten?) I'm also sure of this: I'll never fall in love again. I've lost my innocence. And my disappointment is not that my own home has lost half its value. What disappoints me is me-- that I fell for their propaganda when I knew better, that I actually allowed myself to believe that a person could own a piece of the world when the truth is that anything you try to own ends up owning you.

We're all just renting.

And this is how the poets failed us.

The poets were supposed to remind us of this, to regulate the existential and temporal markets (Let be be finale of seem./The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.) and to balance real estate with ethereal states (one need not be a chamber to be haunted,/One need not be a house). Hell, we don't need bailouts, rescue packages and public works. We need more poets.

-- from The Financial Live of Poets; Jess Walter, 2009