Wealth Management Management

Midas,

The birds are coughing up coins again.

They line the telephone wires strung between marble chimneys and the broken backs of laborers, singing arias in a dialect of oil spills and singed stock certificates. I write this to you with a pen made of barbed wire and ink distilled from the last teardrop of an urchin who sold matches outside the Waldorf-Astoria. You remember the Waldorf, don’t you? The hyphen. You used to sleep in its chandeliers.

O Midas. You incandescent fever. You chandelier of greed. Your kiss turned loam to bullion and bread to brass. America offered herself up like a bride in a veil of railroad smoke, and you pulled back the veil only to find a mechanized Medusa with ticker-tape eyes and a heart pumping molten copper.

The Gilded Age — your masterpiece. A clockwork hallucination. Men in stovepipe hats walking on ceilings. Factories birthing steel hydras. Carnegie wading through rivers of iron while whispering lullabies to ghost children. The air was made of patent leather and Champagne bubbles, and nobody noticed the sky was stitched shut with soot.

Every handshake was a stock option. Every dream came with a deductible. You taught us to confuse height with virtue—skyscrapers scratching their initials into heaven while the tenements below drowned in the sweat of a thousand nameless bodies.

I wandered through the labyrinth once, the one you built from gold-leaf illusions and elephant ivory. J. P. Morgan sat on a throne of melted timepieces, playing chess against a blindfolded bootblack. Each pawn was a union strike. Each rook a shattered rib. I asked him the way out, and he laughed coins from his mouth.

You did this.

You made us believe that opulence was the natural state of being, that scarcity was a myth told by the weak. You dressed famine in furs. You painted over suffering with vermilion and called it progress. But underneath the gilding, the wood always screamed.

Your touch was not a gift but an infection—a delirium of accumulation. We danced on the bones of buffalo and built museums of ash. The rivers ran silver, not with fish but with discarded dreams and factory runoff. The moon refused to look down.

This is not a farewell. There is no leaving a fever dream once it’s baked into your blood. But know this: we have begun to peel back the foil. To eat food not dipped in gold. To walk barefoot across the broken floorboards of your cathedral and remember how it feels to bleed and be real.

Midas, the birds are coughing up coins again, but we no longer gather them.

We let them rot in your filthy streets.