You Would Have Known

You would have known If you'd had the sense to have lingered long Enough to have figured out how things worked And what gave weight to matters of worth You would have known what was known And what you didn't know And the extent to which you didn't know it You would have known Enough to make your ignorance seem noble To provoke thought about thought Even with thoughtless thought And to elicit ayes and nays with little said You would have known If you had stopped yourself from taking off You would have learned some and known How to tinker with text and make high sentence Manipulating thought to make sense You would have known more and more And mastered notions Tweaking facts to suit your taste Or to please, feed or appease emotion You would have known The intricacies of the processes of thought And learned how to follow people And to lead people, not by force But through choice, having mastered thought Most importantly your own And used what was known to give more To get more or to appear to be more You would have known The mechanics of language How to make a verbal sandwich And keep people coming back for more Wanting Wanting to know Wanting others to know Wanting others to know they were in the know