SO THAT'S WHAT HAPPENED TO US IN THE FUTURE by Thomas Lipschultz 10/13/98 The year is 3043 Mankind lives in disharmony Our culture lost all it had found When some phenom'non hit the ground And everything was vaporized And all our hopes unrealized And very few of ours remained With nothing left to be gained Then one day something surfaced new A book! There are so precious few The letters faded, pages ripped The cover old and worn and nipped But barely titled through the nicks was Aristutle's Palitics And full-time worked the scientists Alongside several linguists And Aristutle's saga told To men and women, young and old They learned to live in peace and glee For me and you, and you and me Then some small country asked for us To lend to them our time-jump bus And asked them to our buddy France To give to them some missile grants I heard that they went back in time When World War III made us stop rhyming And threw us off-beat And made us start to babble on and on About gerbils and hamsters And TV trays and basketballs And chinchillas and roast beef And printer cables and Third Eye Blind And this poem and this word right here: BALLOON And now it all makes sense That tiny country rules over us And has for the past millennium I guess that's why, huh