Knowledge is a sword in a scabbard.
Intelligence tells you when to draw.
Wisdom wishes you’d left the heavy thing at home.
Wisdom would lie down for worms if their bed was soft enough.
Like kindling, like spark and like air, life is these three together.
There will never be a trustworthy and easy answer.
We are the offspring of what life and death
started doing to each other a long time ago.
The solutions to all the great riddles are at the tip of your pen.
You will never find them in anyone else’s handwriting.
Swords are for fighting.
But pens win.
Knowledge, intelligence, wisdom.
Make the head spin.

Knowledge self-locked in analysis paralysis.
Mental rust bound the blade to its cage. Intelligence
pulls the lever on the trap door it constructed months before
when it first imagined this situation could turn down the path of problem.
And wisdom, beat its sword into a plowshare already
and paid off the enemy in onions and invented
the alchemy of transforming words like enemy into another word.

Neighbor.

Invented by horses. Wisdom picked up on it back in the dark ages.
‘Neigh’ in horse, an all-encompassing super-word that depending
on tonal quality and inflection, can mean absolutely anything.
Though it is loosely understood as an introspective question
related to the topic of sweet feed.
‘Bor’ is derived from the root-word burr which is an irritating prickly
often stuck in a horse’s coat and is quite uncomfortable but ends up tolerated respectfully albeit under clenched jaw and ground teeth.
Forms ‘Neighbor’, a perfectly acceptable translation for words like villain,
monster, stranger, and many more. All thanks to the horse.

At the end of the day, if we somehow survive our scrap,
it’s wisdom who tends our wounds, and loosens the swordbelt,
lets down our hair and surprises us with warm bread.
Knowledge and intelligence are in your head.
I’ll write this and you’ll know, you’ll feel, it is true.

Wisdom lives in your stomach.

You don’t teach it.
You feed it.
Experiences only.

At night, while we sleep, worn out from lugging a heavy sword
we’ve never rightly used, wisdom weaves story tapestries
from experiences we’ve given it. Without a thought,
absolutely without effort, our minds expand the only way they can.
Subconsciously. When we’re asleep. Free
from the sword-wielding I, My, Me.

Like goldfish, we are, with our personalities
we expand or shrink to fit our container
like water takes the shape of a glass.

The Holy Grail that cradles the bitter wine of humankind is the stomach.
In a way, it’s kind of neat, that it turns out to be exactly true
we are in fact what we eat and drink.