I want to spend my life in school.

Who made the rule against that?

I don’t like to feel that I’m a fool.

But time can be swift and cruel.

From Plato to St. Augustine,

from Ptolemy to Bruno.

Nietzche, Darwin, Marx & Freud

I’ll reread the Inferno.

I’d be hangin’ with the Frankfurt School,

If it weren’t too late for that.

Even if my heroes are dead,

I can still read what they said.

Eudoxus, Gauss & Dedekind

Einstein, Maxwell, Newton,

Spinoza, Leibniz, Wittgenstein,

I’ll read them on my futon.

I like to curl up with a book

What could be better than that?

I might start with something protreptic

before proceeding to an epic.

Jane Austen and Virginia Woolf,

Milton, Shakespeare, Chaucer,

To live without you on my shelf

Is like a cup without a saucer.

I try to live by the Golden Rule

The Good Book taught me that.

If we all spent our lives in school

Maybe things would finally be cool.

Dostoievsky and Tolstoy

Turgenev, Pushkin, Gogol,

To read you in my garrett now

Brings the riches of a mogul.

I want to spend my life in school.

Who made the rule against that?

I don’t like to feel that I’m a fool.

But time can be swift and cruel.

Hugo, Rimbaud and Baudelaire,

Descartes, Rousseau, and Sartre,

You don’t need to be a Francophile

To wish that life were more like art.

Leave a Reply