I'm just an aging baby boomer 
But I prefer a sense of humor 
And am tired of war and of its rumor. 
Tired of all that usual prose 
But I delight in Gogol's nose. 
I prefer to be unamused and silent
Before the mad and hyperviolent.
Of course, I might on an average day
Be discovered reading Hemingway
But I ignore his hymn to night
And think of a certain slant of light
That fell upon an old friend's face
As he spoke of "A Clean Well Lighted Place"
And I forget just what he said
And almost forget the fellow's dead
Dead twenty years before
But what else is my reading for?
Ignore me please! An effect of age.
And excuse me while I turn the page.
If it were (and it ain't) up to me
I think I'd prefer Don Marquis
Over all of his "betters"
In the Arts and the Letters
And to hell with the dull bourgeoisie.

Raymond Chandler was inspired in the shower
And stayed in there for an hour
Then went down the mean streets
And scorned the elites
Childe Roland to the Dark Tower.

In 68 I took some peyote
And read about old Don Quixote
A Classic Comic it was
And I read it because
I was lonely with no antidote.

This all happened in my boyhood bedroom
That's where I nibbled the magic mushroom
Which is amusingly sad
But I was all that I had
And it looked like that would be my doom.

The next day I awoke 'neath a tree
With a rabbit looking at me
Who said without malice
"Don't ask for Alice
She don't talk to the sad bourgeoisie.'