Gnomonic Verses

IN WHICH THE POET LAMENTS THE MISSED OPPORTUNITIES OF A MISSPENT YOUTH. When I was a young man I couldn’t help noticing that when young dogs wanted to mate they spent little if any time on small talk and conserved their energy by getting down to business as directly and economically as possible.

My contemporaries on the other hand approached those activities which, we were taught in our biology lessons, were necessary for the prolongation of the species, obliquely; with preliminary conversation, which, if not checked, tended to become not only the preliminary but the main course as well.

When one opened one’s mouth, one discovered that girls tended to think that one was trying to be clever and to be avoided, or worse that one actually was clever and to be avoided, or one was really not clever, which was better 97