You read books, old and new while the Grecian river flows onward
So you’ve no help for it but to scribble in the margins.
You’ve no help for it…Call Charon or Dickens
It hardly matters, wave your pencil Lethe-wards
No one cares. Pages are an upright affair
And short lived to boot. Once I struggled
For a month to read Egyptian grammar
A college vanity—and so much death
In every line! And look! They scribbled
In the margins, sometimes wrote on men.
“May I look upon my soul and my shadow?”
Asks Anonymous in the Egyptian Book
Of the Dead but no one answers,
Only the clean papyrus
Waving languidly in the wind.
Planet of the Blind 