What Is Truth

If I could talk about beauty today

I’d talk about whirligig seedpods spiraling down from maple trees

Whose leaves lie yellowed and rusted

Beneath the green canopy that has begun its fatal turn

Anticipating the fall

Or the smell of the forest moments after a rainshower

Evoking distant memories

Walking along the trail

My feet play an arpeggio of crunches

But I’m not listening to that song

My mood is as gray and ponderous as the clouds

Massing like warships off the coast

There is little room for beauty

When the ugliness of war is imminent

When the ugliness of violence is prevalent

And the mean spirits of the convinced

Crush any non-conformist view

With the finality of the fallen

Yet even though I ache with empathy

For the lost and beaten

For long lost spirits vanished in genocidal flames

That is not my truth today

My truth is my own pain

The dull ache of bone regenerating

A scabrous tug of congealed tissues beneath a zippered line

Of reddened welts

Ascending my chest like angry punctuation marks

My truth is stolen by my self-absorption

I isolate chaotic messages of a disrupted nervous system

Comprehending metallic intrusions

Listening to the mechanical insistence of the new valve

Then, drained and enervated I fade

Into somnolence

Unable to maintain the illusion of reality

I slumber unconcernedly

Aware of nothing beyond my next breath

Finding a solitary truth

 

 

David Trudel        ©  2013