Peekaboo, I Almost See You

Middle-aged life is merry, and I love to lead it,
But there comes a day when your eyes are all right but
your arm isn’t long enough to hold the telephone
book where you can read it,
And your friends get jocular, so you go to the oculist,
And of all your friends he is the joculist,
So over his facetiousness let us skim,
Only noting that he has been waiting for you ever since
you said Good evening to his grandfather clock
under the impression that it was him,
And you look at his chart and it says SHRDLU
QWERTYOP, and you say Well, why SHRD-
NTLU QWERTYOP? and he says one set of
glasses won’t do.
You need two,
One for reading Erle Stanley Gardner’s Perry Mason
and Keats’s “Endymion” with,
And the other for walking around without saying Hello
to strange wymion with.
So you spend your time taking off your seeing glasses to
put on your reading glasses, and then remembering
that your reading glasses are upstairs or in the car,
And then you can’t find your seeing glasses again be-
cause without them you can’t see where they are.
Enough of such mishaps, they would try the patience of
an ox,
I prefer to forget both pairs of glasses and pass my de-
clining years saluting strange women and grand-
father clocks.