I'm not interested in modern fairytales; real princes and princesses know about loneliness, melancholia, watchfulness and waste; that's as far as I got before an old man named Tom sat down in front of me with a fat -blam!-ing pen in his shirt pocket and told me he'd come to visit (a censored location) from a better place; he wanted to tell me stories but I was getting off after two stops; he told me I was smart, but I feel 10 percent less sure of myself since I let his words escape; that wisdom lost, enough so, that here it is: this poem, not what it was