Tom Sawyer Ain’t Only For Children
[All quotes are by Mark Twain]

Huck was the pariah
Who slept outside and freezed
He was the son of the town drunkard
And lived just as he pleased.

He was “idle and lawless and vulgar and bad –”
All the children admired him” still
Everything that makes “life precious, that boy had”
He “came and went, at his own free will.”

Tom didn’t care if he was a misfit.
” ‘Hello Huckleberry!’ ” — they stopped to chat.
” ‘Hello yourself, and see how you like it.’ ”
” ‘What’s that you got?’ ”
” ‘Dead cat.’ ”

. . .

The schoolmaster looked with a critic’s eye,
At Tom, who was late again
And “about to take refuge in a lie”
As usual. But then . . .

“He saw two long tails of yellow hair”
(Becky?? Heavens above!)
“Hanging down a back that he recognized
By the electric sympathy of love.”

With the emergence of the girl
In a convergence of love and sin
He declared to the teacher — and to all the world
“I stopped to talk with Huckleberry Finn!”

This caused the schoolmaster to gasp
Tom’s future looked pretty dim;
This was more than his class could grasp —
But it caused her to notice him.

. . .

Now the boy who was always late
And in every sense well-tanned
“Began to draw something on the slate,”
Hiding his work with his hand.

“For a time the girl refused to notice”
His efforts or his lines
But her curiosity “began to manifest itself
By hardly perceptible signs.”

Whatever mystery he held
She wanted him to free it.
“At last she gave in and hesitantly whispered:
‘Let me see it.’ ”

“A dismal caricature of a house
With two gable ends to it
And a corkscrew of smoke issuing from the chimney”
He had put his heart into it.

The girl forgot everything else
Which was, of course, the plan
“When it was finished, she gazed a moment, then whispered:
‘It’s nice — make a man.’ ”

. . .

The boy who was generally muddy,
And was forever late
“Made an honest effort to study,
But the turmoil within him was too great.”

In Geography class, he “turned lakes into mountains,
Mountains into rivers” and then
Turned “rivers into continents,
Till chaos was come again.”

She rebuffed him in her feminine way;
He took it hard, sad to say.
He went “over the the hills and far away,
To return to school no more that day.”
But there’s an irony all that does convey:
Because you’ll still find Tom Sawyer in school today.