PRAYER OF THE PROCRASTINATOR: POEM( OCTOBER 1917), REAL ESTATE TIME TO BUY?
This poem is a great little retrospective on the period’s mindset about real estate and values. Printed in the Farm and Land Realtor Magazine ( October 1917).
Prayer of the Procrastinator
I hesitate to make a list
of all the countless deals I’ve missed;
Bonanzas that were in my grip–
I watched through my finger slip
The windfalls which I should have
Bought
Were lost because I over thought;
I thought of this, I thought of that
I could have sworn I smelled a rat,
and while I thought things over twice
another grabbed them at the price;
It seems I always hesitate
then make up my mind much too late.
A very cautious man am I and that is why I never buy.
How Nassau and how Suffolk grew;
North Jersey! Statton Island too!
When others called those sprawling farms
and welcomed deals with open arms;
A corner here, ten acres there,
compounding values year by year,
I chose to think and as I thought
they bought the deals I should have
Bought
The golden chances I had then
are lost and will not come again
Today I cannot be enticed
for everything’s so overpriced
The deals of yesteryear are dead
the market’s soft– and so’s my head.
Last night I had a fearful dream
I know I awakened with a scream’
Some Indians approached my bed–
for trinkets on the barrelhead
( in dollars bills worth twenty-four
and nothing less and nothing more )
They’d sell Manhattan Isle to me,
the most I’d go was twenty-three
The redman scowled: ” Not on a Bet!”
and sold to Peter Minuit.
At times a teardrop drowns my eye for deals I had, but did not buy; And now life’s saddest words I pen,—
” IF ONLY I’D INVESTED THEN !”
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