New Poem: my father was a liar.

My father was a liar

– is a liar –

and he wanted

– wants –

to please people,
to tell a good story,
to be Irish,
to make life easier.

I can’t say

– I don’t know –

if he ever got what he wanted out of lying,
but, once I figured out
he couldn’t be trusted,

I resolved not to be a liar.
And that’s a useful fiction

– the causality –

because, had he been an honest man,
I wouldn’t have resolved to be a liar,

unless the hard wiring

– my hard wiring –

is set
to opposition
rather than honest,
as I hope it
to be.

later on,
I resolved to write like a camera,

to make eyes of words,
a lens of sentences,
and sprocket holes of punctuation.

the light
our light
our shared light you
as reader I
as writer
would do the rest

because I wanted to be true
true to these moments
these still moments
of clarity

but nothing can be true to them

truth is a property of language
and these moments
are felt
deep in the history of the brain
before sentences
words
punctuation and the spaces between them
this knowledge
this feeling of knowledge
of understanding
knowing feeling understanding
emerged

– emerges –

long before our reflective minds.

So, I guess that makes me a liar.

—

Sign-up for a topic focussed newsletter and receive only the content you most enjoy.

About these ads

Tagged: my father was a liar, poem, Poetry, Sterling Lynch

Posted in: Poetry