I love a challenge…

anselm23 posted this challenge in his LJ:

1. A friend of mine writes roleplaying games for a living, and I earn some extra cash that way myself. What would you write for a living, or what do you write for a living?
2. A friend of mine just pushed me into reading the Count of Monte Cristo by telling me that my education would be complete after I read it. What book do you recommend as the book that will complete anyone’s education?
3. What three books are on the list of things you want to read but haven’t yet, and why do you want to read them?
4. What city, fictional or genuine, do you most want to visit, and why?
5. If you could switch bodies with someone for twenty-four hours, whose body would you want to inhabit?

He also offered bonus points if it was done in the form of a poem.

I may have taken a liberty or two with the strict truth, but here you go:

THE PERFECT WORLD REVISITED

In a perfect world I will live in someday
gold will be handed to me just for
inscribing my three names
in a blank book, illuminating the first letters of each
word with gilt and indigo flourishes, then
setting fire to the pages. As they flame out

I will walk
away from the bookstand
chanting the praises of monasteries. I will pretend
to take the vow of silence
just long enough to get all my crazy relatives
to stop talking to me – and then, I’ll run, baby,

I’ll run – and
I’m gonna go get my education then, you bet:
read the phone book so that I may appreciate
the nine million names of God, from Aaron Aachen
to Zyrtan Zyrrva; plot
takeovers of donut havens and
broth canneries, scheming for the sole control of
America’s comfort food industry (which I will treat as
a sacred trust until something better comes along);
and then, I’ll travel: go to Venice for the water,
Prague for the clarity, Istanbul for the hell of it –
I’ll screw my way through the royal families of Eurasia —
after assuming the secret identities of every hero I’ve ever read about.

In this way will pass the days until,
one day, while reading Pilgrim’s Progress,
or Moby Dick, or Valley of the Dolls –
which in fact are all the same book in my perfect world —

I will look up and see something
in the face of the last lover I tossed aside
and the perfect world will crumble,
like dust or old taffy underfoot:

I would give everything to be myself again,
and to have you with me,

as it was
before I ever dreamed of a perfect world.