My entry for Day 4 in the 31 Days in Seuss challenge is a little late, but I’m posting yesterday’s and today’s now. This one was the hardest to rhyme so far.
MY BOOKS
If you wanted an accurate glimpse of myself
Stop by and survey the books on my shelf
They’re tattered and worn and filled with scribbles
The many unsettled scholarly quibbles
I’ve had with those writers over the years
And which fashioned the borders of my thinking’s frontiers
There’s the mundane, the mighty, the deep and the smart
Derrida, Foucault, Fanon and Sartre
Lots of philosophers from the region of France
And Americans, too, who wear French Thinking Pants
Alongside the Frenchies, and worth equal mention
Are the great works of many illustrious menschen
Nietzsche and Kant, Marx and Hegel
Philosopher-poets, like Goethe and Schlegel
They have their own space, as is their wont
(Their Gegend is still la arrondissement)
On separate shelves you’ll find all my fiction
Full of addiction, constriction, affliction, contradiction
Dosteovsky, Kundera, Franzen and Roth,
Foer and Faulkner (most are in cloth)
Junot Diaz and his sad Oscar Wao
And all of the tragedy that space will allow
You won’t find any sci-fi or Beat Generation
But there’s plenty besides for smart conversation
The subjects that keep me ever transfixed
With the ins and the outs of Realpolitiks
No vampires, no volumes of young Harry Potters
I much prefer Steinbeck– his downtrodden squatters
Stand in for the rest of us weak human beings
Petty and proud, in search of some meaning
To make our small lives seem less ordinary
When recorded by artists of arts literary.
My books, my friends, my confidantes too
I cannot imagine my space without you
There’s just this one thing, which I cannot approve:
You’re such a pain in the ass when I move!
