Better Lies
Tomorrow I will tell better lies,
ones that are fit to wrap around the truth.
You can’t serve up just the facts.
That would be too cold.
No, you must warm it up,
add spice, distort it,
so not even you can recognize
exactly what you are talking about.
Practice
Every day I practice at being nothing.
I sit or stand or lay on the ground
and disappear into air and silence.
Those who walk by ignore me
as I ignore myself,
my value less than a bug on the wall,
a stain on the ceiling,
a sliver of cellophane carried in the wind.
I work at it. Work so hard
that my knuckles bleed in the snow
while a thousand miles away
my toes drift senseless in the ocean.
One day, with luck, I’ll achieve
all that is, all that ever was,
and know how little I am
and how little any of it was.
Somewhere in the middle
There are things I do
that I shouldn’t,
and things I write
that I should not.
Ah, we are born perfect.
Someone said so.
But others have said
we are born flawed.
It is only natural,
since we exist in nature,
that I should be
both good and bad
and all that is in between.
It is all there on the graph,
the bell curve
of human behavior.
The comedy, the tragedy,
the horror,
along with all the mundane
that makes up most of the story.
Doing what we must
Poetry won’t stop bullets.
It won’t stop grief.
It won’t stop humans
from being beasts.
It does make life and death
and the stuff between
sound better, read or said,
than wails and screams,
and the thud
of lead and fists and rods
into luckless flesh.
Words must be said
for the dead.
Tradition dictates so.
Make that final recitation
ring of heaven, fate, change.
Then begin the real prayer,
the one you and I must live,
day and night until the end
of what has been with us
from the beginning
of words and men and need
for this or that,
or just more,
and more
and more
of the needless same.
Dumpster Fire Press 