We anguish over what is lost:
Some watch not even made of gold
Worth so much more than what it cost
We feel we’ll never be consoled.

To turn ache into consciousness,
Make health out of a malady,
Transmute defeat into success,
Swap death with immortality—

These are a culture’s toughest tasks. 
Prometheus aimed to help us cope
By fashioning for us eyeless masks
To blot out terror with blind hope.

Mere alchemy can’t refine lead, 
Magic’s a meretricious fake.
We must look to ourselves instead 
And in shared grief our solace take.

In every photograph they’re glad,
Buoyant, blithe, ringed close by friends.
For the loss of the lives they led 
No memory will make amends.

Yet for a time these photographs
Instinct with their vitality,
Fixing in light their smiles and laughs,
Nearly master mortality.  

Two genial spirits, shafts of joy
Who lit their world and others’ too,
One charming girl, one splendid boy,
Forever now the two we knew.
                        

Dear Maggie, here’s the résumé:
Today was just like yesterday.
Ate my breakfast at breakfast time;
Tried to compose something sublime,
Failed; washed and dried my shorts and socks 
Then played an English suite of Bach’s.
For dinner, pasta with that sauce
You like.  Still, not a total loss
Because I got in a bike ride.
Round midnight, I tried to decide  
Whether to commit suicide.
Obviously, I chose not to,
Though perhaps I really ought to.
Tomorrow, I’ll labor and pray—
Bet it’ll be just like today. 
                        

Immanuel Kant
stepped on a red ant
as Rousseau did up his laces,
and old Thomas Hobbes
hit defensive lobs
while Nietzsche served nothing but aces.
Plato, by the wall,
retrieved each stray ball;
Locke slouched and emptied a bottle;
Epictetus took showers,
Epicurus picked flowers,
though fewer than Aristotle.
John Stuart Mill
exercising great skill
charged daringly up to the net;
Descartes, I believe,
stood firm to receive
smashes for most of a set.
Cynics in the bleachers
beat up their teachers
yet refused every offer of beer.
Existentialists barked
from down where they'd parked
that the stadium looked mighty queer.
Spinoza baked Hegel
a hot garlic bagel
while Diogenes looked on and leered.
Augustine broke wind
while Wittgenstein sinned,
behaving egregiously weird.
Heinrich von Kleist
chewed onions he'd diced
then washed them all down with a Coke,
and Socrates said
“I’d sooner be dead
unless this whole thing is a joke.”
Marx cursed out his uncles
and scratched his carbuncles
till they bled all over the court.
Kierkegaard tarried
and never got married;
Locke’s serves fell pitifully short.                  
And as it grew hazy
Thales went crazy
and Antisthenes wholly insane;
Aquinas scarfed jelly
and forlorn Mary Shelley
left to walk nude in the rain.
Leibniz gobbled ices
and Freud had some vices
that would make Thrasymachus blush;
Aristippus's mother
was just such another. . .
Hume never remembered to flush.