He spends long nights immersed within
the bookish thoughts of scholars who 
will tell him life is paying dues,
is sacrifice, is suffering.

Between the paragraphs he dreams
of harmony and happiness,
an intellectual success
where life is more than what it seems.

He reads again, more carefully,
and learns that man is base and vile,
and any hope to change that style
betrays its own futility.

The book is shut as if it were
a joke, for now he has discerned,
for all the things he’ll ever learn,
the only truth he’ll find is her.