Eight: Honesty (poem)
Honesty
Honesty become a tool of abuse
Your hands pumping frankness
up your neck-strings, mottling your frozen features
with lifelike mantling, roseating from your mammoth pores
Soon
As, from your salesman’s case you pull nothing
Saleable to the present state
But bandy, as a bandwidth manipulator
Your loutish telling of your It
Like (you say) it is
Like the only mission worth pursuing
Had been to map the body’s nerveways
Soon. We’ll stifle the crying
No use for it, now we know you’re lying
It’s beyond, beyond, what you swear is true…har, har, you
Kidder. Outside eyes
narrow these days…those Orphan Annie dots of yours
(Annie…Hey. Let me put an elbow in your rib.
This is gonna make you blush
Carry that memory of yourself to the grave)
Arr, but sharpster, not you, you can’t accept excuses
Excuses, excuses!
Lips so crazy loosèd
Where is the honesty? Where the sincerity?
Right away you’re raging and disgusted
The human species’ doubtful range of “trust”
muscle twitches fool us…there is far worse
Did you know? Betsy Ross did not sew the first American flag
And so…y’all (your MC’s not from Texas, but she’s been there)
…they’ll tell you this is a Ponzi scheme
Did you know, if your lacrimal nerve was tingling
You’d convince yourself that you were weeping
Honesty
Righteousness
(2020, Stephanie Foster)