Socrates, who never wrote a word, was convicted of impiety & corrupting the youth & sentenced to die by drinking hemlock. Out of guilt, Athenians immediately erected a bronze bust of his solemn, silent head & scholars immediately began distorting his words in writing.
Let’s glorify the man
We just put to death
With a statue of his head
Mute, dumb, and deaf
Socratic irony
Corrupts from his bust
Bronze neither rusts
Nor puts up a fuss
“Who believes words
Is an utterly simple person
In reading what’s written
Nothing’s clear or certain”
Ironic quotes
From a man whose concern
Was not to conflate
Real knowledge with words
The only way I
Could know who he was
Because somebody did
And somebody does
Ask scholars why
No I, me nor mine
No first-hand account
No words from the wise
Scholars believe
Socrates couldn’t read
Christ couldn’t write
And they could not afford scribes
Words are worthless
In discerning the Truth
Words put knowledge to death
Words corrupt the youth
Memory’s not mind
Knowledge is not a mime
Experience carves it out
Like sharpening a knife
To scholars of future
Present and past:
Interpretation and regurgitation
Is neither knowledge nor fact
Kids, don’t drink the hemlock
Of scholars and scribes
Their paper’s worth more on the toilet
Than their words are in your mind
“Writing is unfortunately like painting; for the creations of the painter have the attitude of life, and yet if you ask them a question they preserve a solemn silence”