Alchemisland

They had read but nine books between them, what their libraries had available

Besides the Bible, a smattering of John Bunyan, a line or two from Donne

Abundance of knowledge like a ring too small

To learn or love when you already know it all

Neither gall nor guile surprises the self-reliant

His earth the tyrant, its chieftains creatures

The smotherer babe-eater Crom-feeder the ired-beater the tophet-heater

His mind is iron

Tuned to irony, which his opposers thought some metal

Did knowledge and craft save Byron in the end, convulsing under Zeus’ sun

They are moored by fixity, moored by assurance, on their lonely isles

Something confining in the mining of more information

Some knowledge is above our station, serving only to beguile

The mind o’erfacted near fractures, thoughts chaosing like a murmuration

Each new fact learnt in isolation

Serves to further my alienation

My mind’s mutilation

Strewn with refuse from other men, scraps ink-blended with others’ pens

The self-beguiled trade their wiles, and sometimes wives, for a while

Elsewhere, at Ellesmere or a riven dell where elves settled

A gilded chain, a self-offering, a long self burning, confining

Worse having only a little knowledge, consigning the mind to ignorance

Each subsequent fact erases those at its back, a ceaseless trance 

One Youtube video has you wise to every NASA scam and CERN plan to distance

Earth from heaven, each week you have a new stance on the week’s events

Evincing hoodwinks and hidden hands, looking askance at the latest stay at home orders

You post a screengrab of bullet pointed fictions, erroneous facts cause dereliction in the cathedral of you, you say to strengthen the borders

You tell people to do their research, link to a blog about the New World Order

Fucking hell, do you remember when this guy was normal? Touch grass

Presumably touched, or not touched, by dad, something in the psyche gone bad

Like a shook up can fit to burst glad we have no guns, he calls his pad truth alley

He wrote it in chalk, you can see that he erased the word Ali

What stance can you have when you have only danced with dad

Your hands postured like a crab’s around some drab potboiler, your pad

Scarred with bad poetry

Despite chasms of risingfalling between them, both discoursed with Plato

They hadn’t seen Pluto then. They had duty.