To Be Or Not To Be Poem by Riley Choma

To have enlightenment or to have ‘education: ' this is the question:

Whether ‘tis nobler to be of those that are educated or those of free will

The arrows and slings of assignment deadlines, Or to laugh and scream at life's unexpectancies, and lowering said grades by doing so?

To procrastinate: to entertain; no more; and by school say we end all fun, and a thousand additional entertainments my time has been partial to,

‘tis a consummation devoutly involved though uncontrolled.

To live, to learn; to live: to parlance; ay, and escape from stresses of today;
for in the entertainment of art, nature, and other human beings, what worries we hold may temporarily diminish

When we have shuffled off imprisoning duties,

Must give us pause: there's the desire

That would make life so calm;

For those who bare the whips and scorns of time, society's wrong, the channelized being's sorrow,

The pangs of despised, forceful, facets of knowledge, the laws for a freedom that regards no choices, a lit fire is taken young from thy eyes by oppression.

When we ourselves might our lives make

With a determined sense of reinvention? who would live without questioning,

To be stifled by modernization, to be blind of life's greater importance,

But to have breathed, but never truly lived,

the most pondered questions gone still unanswered, ‘tis a life without living

And makes us rather ill of faith in ourselves and other sources

To learn but know of mostly nothing?

Thus modern education makes Ignoramuses of us all; and thus the native hue of dissatisfaction

Is thick and suffocating by unknown reason for many,

and our lives a long line lacking meaning and fulfillment

With this regard we remain unenlightened,

and lose the name of action. - May you now acknowledge life's faults

The lack luster naivety! No more, and now in new understanding

Be all my words remember'd.