2.

When Morris Imposternak throws his round shield

Down during, say, the battle of Phillipi or something

Who knows what poems, what true propositions

Will rise out of the sticky, fragrant loam?

If he were a monist philosopher,

His principle would monism,

But it’s hard to believe your own thoughts

And phenomena can be so distracting…

And books can be so disheartening…

And anything can be just so anything:

Thus Russell developed his theory of types to get rid of the Village Barber

         Paradox,

But who cares about the theory of types?  What’s really interesting is the

         Village Barber Paradox!

Or take the phenomenon of love:

He felt such tenderness toward you,

That writing "tenderness" I sigh

"Alas, poor Morris!"

Yet, since no one from the scientific community has ever explained love

          to everyone’s satisfaction

Scientists fall in love or do not fall in love

Without any of them really knowing when they are in love or not,

Whether they are in love or not.

This is true.  It is also true

That where there’s tenderness, there’s suffering:

Hence when we say that an elbow is tender,

It means we have a booboo,

And money, announcing itself as "legal tender,"

Causes suffering, but in such a way as to absolve the beneficiary thereof

           from responsibility therefor.

Look at the sea!  Don’t you think that the sea too suffers

When it pulls up its skirt at low tide

And shows the varicose veins, the ingrown hairs, the splotches

Along its cold, pale, swollen, hypertensive leg?

It is possible that ideas don’t suffer —

Such as the idea of suffering, for instance, —

But we are not ideas, are we?

Morris Imposternak, at least, is not an idea.