The new and vacant rooms
in our minds
we have gone to great lengths
to furnish
with plush seats
from ivory towers of learning,
fancy lanterns for lucubration
from stores of shining lights
and stacks of meanings
from rich seams of self-learning,
all assiduously assembled.
There are the lecturers’ lecterns
the professors’ chairs
the philosophers’ armchairs
burnished bureaus in all corners
and overloaded bookshelves.
These rooms in our minds
are liable to be cluttered
and to overflow
with a deluge of collections
of arcane cognitions
torrents of truths both evident
and hypothesized.
To our guests
with enquiring minds
we do not know
where to begin
to display our rich eruditions.
Worse we do not know
on what note to end
as we are keen to interest them
in our acquisitions
but they have no ready means
to take up the offers;
besides they may have too much
of their own.
We manage to find the space
somehow to add more,
though we increasingly forget
where we put what,
so retrieval is an issue.
We feel fine that we have so much
up there; even if of little use
we desire others to reckon
with our intellectual showrooms
so when out, we leave all lights on!