Formation of a Young Irish Intellectual
after Nazim Hikmet
You will go far young person
if as soon as you enter this building
you follow standard operating procedures
and stop thinking altogether.
We will do the thinking for you.
For the more intellectually curious of you
this will be as difficult initially
as nailing yourself to a chair.
But the appropriate doses
of the right sort of alcohol will ease
you into it.
Before long, you’ll find yourself
not thinking a thing.
In your lunch break, you’ll write poems
that are secretly okay with NATO
and won’t know where they came from.
But we’ll know,
and that’s all that matters.
We have a library of pre-existing think pieces
from which you can choose your opinions,
which we’d like you to massage
so they seem different at first
but end up being exactly the same as the rest of us.
For there is no opinion worth having
that someone in here hasn’t already had.
You will be in favour of all the right wars
without having to sweat the niceties
and put the appropriate flag
on your Twitter handle
without us ever having to mention it.
You have no idea yet
the thoughts we have in store for you.
Feature Image: UCD Quinn School of Business.