Teetotalers of Knowledge

Wisdom watches from the shorelines,
tearfully accepting how the intervention of ignorance has given minions
freedom to abandon the once addictive habit of learning,
allowing the currents of opportunity to evaporate
as they embrace their own status quo,
choosing to drift, rather than swim forward.

Everywhere, the waters of intelligence rapidly stagnate,
and like a global AA meeting advocating the maxim
that finding one’s life preserver comes from within—
not by virtue of another’s escapism—
addicts of unawareness stare with vacuous void,
addressing little of the mind’s ability to recover,
become buoyant again, and reach out for
man’s most cherished gift.

How lonely the realm of knowledge has become,
languishing on the banks of rapidly diminishing synaptic current,
its adrift waters finding only polluted and uninformed expression to cling to.

Mournfully, erudition is beginning to gasp,
as struggling depths of truth find the surface harder and harder to reach,
even as logic extends its hands for rescue,
and cognition awaits its call to assist,
reason remains incorruptible.