Bottle Nosed Philoophies

A bottle nosed dolphin with one bubble eye
Swims the seas and scans the skies
Looking for something different,
Something real,
Something new.

One day he spied a toy ship,
A rubber-duckie, and his lucky tin-snips
That he'd lost
When he was two.

So he asked them where they had been all this time,
And they answered him in a mariner's rhyme,
And an ancient one at that.

They said,
"We've been off to Starbucks Coffee,
Where we learned about the Internet
And acidophilus,
And what our philosophies are.

And we've learned, too
How to characterize you
By what yours are.
 
If you prefer motive over action,
We can say with satisfaction,
That you’re an Idealist.
But if action itself is the measure
By which you decide to stock your treasure,
Then a Realist
You surely are.
 
If you value the virtue of humility,
Renunciation is the greatest ability you ever saw.
But if you believe the strength of Will Power
Trumps universal law, then Schopenhauer
And Nietzsche define your game
(Both forced into brilliance
By learning to spell their own last names.)
 
If you believe in the salvation of certain types or classes
You have been infused by the sacerdotal castes.
If you believe God exists apart from nature,
Deist or Theist is the nomenclature
That properly describes your station,
But if you believe that God is absorbed in creation
And rules it from within,
You are a believer in Pantheism.
 
Personalists believe in perfection as perfect individualism.
Impersonalists see completion as complete absorption
Into a greater, all-wise principle, and if you find central
The efficacy of hierarchy and ritual,
You are a Ceremonialist, and value systematic priestcraft,
Whereas if your attitude toward religion is one of extreme simplicity,
And you regard all outward religious shows as vain ones,
But you devote yourself to a mystic presence or inner communion,
Then you are an Anti-institutionalist.
 
If in your quest for knowledge, you are satisfied
With the material world and its atomic sense inside,
Then you are a Materialist.
If you demand knowledge of the superphysical
Causes behind the form, then Transcendentalist
Is the word to describe you best,
But if in Transcendentalism you long to know the mystery
Through the rationale of knowing, then you are an Occultist.
And if your insight is inspiration or feeling you’re a Mystic,
If your conversion is influenced by reflex, then clearly, you’re a Psychic.”
 
Then the bottle nosed dolphin
Heard a sound
Of a hand in the bathtub, and going down
It pulled the drain.
 
And then he saw something new,
As he was pulled, too,
Down and out of the tubbie.
He didn’t have time to say, “Good-bye,”
To the tin-snips, the ship, or the rubber-duckie-guy
Who all were too big to go.
 
So he didn’t say
That “Mystic, Anti-institutionalist”
Seemed to have a good feel,
And didn’t bother to add that he wasn’t real,
Anyway.
 
-jenn long