Nobody shouts in "Disaster capitalism." The speaker sounds mild, even polite, and that mildness is where the poem's sting lies. In six short lines it sets out a whole moral landscape: one person quietly working out how to make money from a coming catastrophe, and a wider "we" who answer a spreading plague by laughing themselves to sleep. The central idea is that disaster is dangerous twice over. Someone will exploit it, and everyone else is too comfortable, too amused, to stop them.
The first tercet is a single thought, spoken almost under the breath. "come a reckoning" has the shape of an idiom like "come the day," and the lowercase, unpunctuated start makes it sound overheard rather than composed. "Reckoning" carries two meanings. It is a day of judgement, but it is also a calculation, a settling of accounts. The speaker hears the first meaning and immediately thinks of the second. The hedge in "I think I shall be able" is chillingly domestic. "Shall" is stiff and well-mannered, and "I think" makes the plan sound as casual as arranging a dinner party. Then comes "profit off it." The choice of "off" over "from" is telling, because it suggests feeding on something, the way a parasite does. The word is colloquial and slightly greasy, and it lands on the weakest beat of the stanza, as if the speaker were trailing off into private satisfaction.
The second tercet widens the lens and changes the tense. The first stanza deals in the future and the hypothetical ("come a reckoning," "shall be able"), while the second is flatly present: the plague "increases still." That line has a steady, almost iambic tread, like a tally being kept. "Still" also works two ways, meaning "yet" and meaning "motionless," and the second sense quietly prepares the ending. The next line is the longest in the poem, nearly twice the length of its neighbours, and it sprawls: "but like a parliament not much concerned." The stretched rhythm mimics the drawl of people who feel no urgency. The comparison is pointed too, since a parliament is a body whose name comes from the French for "to speak," and the very institution meant to respond to a crisis becomes the model of shrugging indifference. Notice also that the speaker never says "I" again. Private greed turns into collective complicity, and the reader is pulled into the "we."
The last line, "we laugh to sleep," is only four syllables, and it drops away like a step that isn't there. It twists the familiar phrase "cry yourself to sleep." Laughter here is an anaesthetic, not a release, and it fits the earlier calm of the speaker's voice. The sounds support this: "still" and "sleep" echo the soft sibilance of "plague increases," so the poem seems to hush itself. Nothing rhymes, and "able" and "it," or "concerned" and "sleep," never meet. That denies the reader the small click of closure that rhyme gives, so the poem ends unresolved while its people settle into rest. There is no punctuation anywhere, not even a final full stop. The sentences simply stop, as if sleep had taken them.
The poem's significance lies in this restraint. The title is a clinical label for an economic idea, and the poem answers it with the most intimate, unguarded speech, so the abstraction becomes a person you could sit next to. It names no particular disaster, place or year, which lets it fit any crisis in which someone stands to gain while the rest of us look away. It also doesn't denounce. It lets the speaker incriminate themself and then, with that small word "we," quietly includes the reader. A poem this short could be forgotten in a breath, but it works like an aphorism, easy to remember and uncomfortable to keep.