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)