The Principles of Truth

What is truth?

Is it the words that are spoken?

To restrain the righteousness of thought within recesses of one’s mind,

Is this to deny the words their truth and life?

Does this become them lies?

Many many words uttered by my tongue have been but nothing more than false,

Slime-coated, slick and sly, meant to meander down a path

That pulled them close to what was true,

So that it appeared as so, and so it appeared to you.

So do these things that I have uttered become such truthes?

And those that gasp within the gaps of thought and fantasy,

Do their corpses pass through the ether with but misery,

And there they ride Charon’s boat to some eternal place,

Where tombstones mark them with solemn face and in this circumstance,

Does their moss-bedecked epitaph read: “But something buried without substance?”

The heart that beats the bass drum boom, that eggs time on

And draws all mystery and fantasy of mind back to reality,

Does the secrets that it does possess, that cannot be heard in their whispering

Against the brassy bashing of the cymbal-ring

Fade out and become meaningless?

Do these things that whip the heart into frenzied pace,

Die with but a tombstone to mark their place and nothing more,

No epitaph to read: “Forever found these words began a life, opened a door?”

And what of those unnerring shouts uttered in shallow solitude,

Ones that rock and sway and flow and ebb,

That often push man time and again

To speak out-right the words concealed,

Yet still a fearsome fear that slays their fortitude,

Then wrenches righteousness away, and bends their lips so they cannot say

The things but said in loneliness–lost pale and bitter loneliness?

Are these grand pronouncements delivered with morbid disregard,

Drug down with weights and buried beneath the ground,

An ivy-wreathed and marble plaque to announce in absent sound:

“Here lies unheard but uttered words, that no memory shall nor could preserve?”

Are all these things transformed to lies?

If something is not seen, is it invisible to the eyes?

If something is not touched, does it lack the power to be felt?

If something stews in shadowed swamps, does it become impossible to be smelled?

These things seem to be such abstract absurdities,

Yet in the cemetary of the mind’s eye lies such words as these….

But “I love you” is true.  And “I love her” is true. 

And I did feel it in my heart beneath the beating,

Like undertows and currents swirling, swelling,

I felt with my hands my chest’s rising and it’s telling

Me, it’s telling me, it’s telling me that it is truth,

That words are not spoken out to become belief,

That man but does this for they are far beneath

The truth, far beneath divinities of dreams and God,

That love is truth and life moves on,

And if death grabs you by your throat and cuts the words

And fills your eyes with blackened smoke,

So you choke and cry and cry and choke,

And the devil wraps your neck with bitter yoke,

You’ll rise again…in celestial fire you’ll breathe again,

Like some star that twists and bends the light….

You’ll live again to know that you heard the words

And felt your chest as it beat out loud

And wrenched the grasps of eternity about its waist

And drew back the breath to scream once more,

“I love her.” And it shall echo nevermore.

Yet not should it die away with you, put down below in narrow house,

But instead be felt within the beating hearts of all about

The world.

And so you wane.

Yet truth remains.