In Passing

We have alternative facts.
—Various administration spokespeople

On the surface an intelligible lie, underneath an unintelligible truth.
—Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

The copperhead slithers along without bending
its spine. The ridges on its underside are like
boot treads.
          That was the example I was using
until he thought I was calling him a snake.

True or not.
          Which led me to believe each word's
a magnet for what you want to believe. Not for
what I meant. For what he thought I meant.

A slight breeze slips through the pines and disappears.

The cook puts his finger in the soup to test it, then
changes the recipe.
              Beneath Vermeer's “Girl
Reading a Letter at an Open Window” there is a hidden
naked angel still floating above the girl.
                       Yesterday
a meme led millions to believe a lie.
                     AI wants you
to believe what it wants to be.
                  It steals our electricity
the way it steals truth.
             Truth has become a casualty
of alternative facts and stories.
                 The good old days are
a metaphor for regression.
                War is a metaphor
for genocide, thus Gaza, thus Ukraine, thus Sudan,
thus whatever is next, or already happening.

The fog in the valley is getting denser each morning.

Someone quotes the bible to prove we shoudl cheat
the poor, or send them “back where they came from.”

Truth is in the heart is what I always believed.

It’s hard to get the news from poems like this,
but people die everyday for the truths we find there,
wrote the poet William Carlos Williams.
                       Dictators fear
poets and writers because they have opinions and truths.

You have to see what’s not supposed to be there,
not what is, like troops in the streets as practice
for what will come later,
              like the snake we see
only by the movement of the tall grass it has
tried to hide itself in.
            Each lie is a mask
for a larger, deadlier lie.
              How easy it is to create
your own dictionary, as Orwell knew, as we now
know.
   Our attention span diminishes each year.

In the end, the snake strikes regardless of your story.

This piece was featured in Volume 3, Number 3. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.