Privileged Sons And Potted Plants

This morning, while online, I kept on coming across the fact that the conservative MP Jacob Rees-Mogg had once referred to people who were educated at state schools as "potted plants" and implied that they weren't likely to be able to write a literate letter. So it inspired me to write a poem which, as so often happens, ended up a little more abstruse than I intended!


Privileged Sons And Potted Plants

"Youth is wasted on the young!" is attributed to Oscar Wilde
Or George Bernard Shaw, who really knows?
There are privileged sons on whom the gift of literacy is wasted.
Potted plants are immeasurably less defiled
Than a one dimensional intelligence that shows
How real understanding has never yet been tasted.

If manners maketh man it is also true that they conceal
A reigning chaos in those unconscious parts
Where devils, angels, simpletons and intellect collide.
The persona is reluctant to reveal
The habitual nature of some darker arts
Where service of the ego feeds the individual pride.

"The potted plants, they have no minds so there's nothing they can change.
Mass hypnosis fodder, all of them you see!"
Ah, but if some should question, breathe and move and wonder
If there is something really rather strange
About force feeding suggestibility,
A privileged son may find that he is torn asunder.

© Geoff Davis 2019