Knowing

January 02, 2021


It takes only a smallest smack of little thinkings

Unless you’re cold unconscious; happily winking

And have been drinking this high Hogmanay

(erstwhile, t’other nicht!)

Mirk on the paths which work with what we think we know:

A bag with a sad hole and summarily losing slow

A trickle, a good grasp on this phenomenology’s

Improbable shadow-show

There’s not much in the end

When friend collateral damage makes show

Eschews the naked accomplishments of man -

A pickle hapless

Sloughed knowledge; so far from set secure

Onhand to bide us

We think we are right regnant, top the world

Of sapience aplomb

A heyday now, and how!.. we latterly have ridden

Our railroad all the way through

                           *

The masks of the old Grecians have come off; no doff,

We once splendidly lauded; that’s all gone

Alexandrian sages, their éclair propensities

For wisdom, ’twas so wise, nor nowhere higher,

And now's a poor semantics

The soul, ago, a tripartite composure

Of factions sat in balance

Electrical styli late have lifted that valance

To new credulity

A novel, hero, neuro-circuitry

The land was once for credence; minding

Godrics and Guthruns

Sir Tristems, and Minerva, hot Achilles, Walsinghams

The Sirens; northern Klingsor: now this muckle crowd's withdrawn,

Ceded to show

Gondwanaland, our sure demure conjecture,

A basement full of rocks and hard places

Here scores and wars cause, carry more, polemic glee;

Their lovely confrontations with ‘reality’

These clouds come showering, overpowering,

Brute-diffusing rainbows

The crows mob nightingales

The loveliness of our Lord now revisited

As an old wives’ tale

All’s so;. Please near, and ask your ear hear inklings...

One word: appearances are prima facie slunk

Out of the magic wardrobe, to the pantry cupboard hunt

Seasonal eating, drinking; devil take the laggard

This is the best, the zest, our mistletoes might throw

At us, their milk-white poisonous fat berries...

Not blessed Christmas!

Our knowledge, fresh from college, is a dangerous thing

A plasticated ocean, not a deep Pieiran Spring

Profuse excuse for fancy-free dissatisfactions

A wanderers’ lopsided thoroughfare

Pilate, although a Roman, politic and Procurator

Conceded an admission he had written what he’d written

‘King of the Jews’ - thus the Good News accelerated

By a tangent feed

Borne down in power The Judgement frighted

Shaken Pilate

That silence recognised; that composition stumped

Here was an atheling so much more than legal Moses

A slam to Solomon;

He’d had to try The Supersonic Boom of Knowledge

                               *

Now think but just a little; a meagre jot; a tittle

No concentration.

On stars; on what we ares; a cosmic-ocean’s dust

Fair pearls, stringing long atoms; maybe fashion’s

‘Information’?

A blast, a cluster, merry muster, of viewless nerve-end thinkings

A whit no prettier Caucasian than Berber

Class, pass, we, all alike

Anomalous awe-thralled, short-in-gasp-appalled objects

Incomprehensibles.

A gloss of shellac is our protective smack of understanding.

Sheep: and too deep the wells and waters fall in fathoms

To succour wonder's thirsts, or birdbrained aspirations

The Pastoral Shepherd of the flock only can quell that passion

In we obstinates; Nations, who would hew to rank and queue

All things, for good and evil; the ancestral curse

But one thing needful only. Read it: book, chapter and verse