To know a truth is not to need lies

lies are cold and the truth is warm

Why do we make-up stories and tell them to our friends around a campfire?

If I walk down main street, I neglect

the neglected path

It goes to the graveyard,

where bodies get tired of lying still

smoke and fog in contrast to stars and street lights

offering clear directions, to tired travelers

in a city of lost people.

I don’t want to memorize streets

that tell me where to go, St. Paul or St. Peter

I prefer the pathless woods,

a nameless truth

that can’t be understood.

When I listen to know-it-alls, I don’t want to know it all

I challenge them with unarticulated feelings

and they always win, with cold hard facts

their memorized words, don’t hold any mystery

Do they seem mysterious to you, when they shout their truth?

To say the name of God, doesn’t mean they know God

We draw nearer to the fire, to stay away from the cold

We don’t want to be yelled at

There’s a block of marble, that I carve

in the neglected graveyard

brittle, with age

burned, by hell

hard

I cut figures of beauty, from neglected lost causes

stones bleed, and the bodies underground

yell

It’s too late for them

and too late for me

forgiveness and humility, cut into my heart of stone

so that love turns to flesh

full of suffering and meaning.

I memorialize myself,

but graveyards are neglected,

and my chiseled name can’t cry-out.

It’s easy to be remembered, less so

to shape the living

to bleed each person, drip by drip

is to be curious, about their marbled heart

like pink veins, or black grain

to be studied

and never understood.

Alcoholics sleep in the graveyard

with newspapers stuffed inside their clothes

for warmth

the truth, is the paper

and

the cold words, have no meaning

pages and pages

of vanity

serve a purpose, that wasn’t intended.

Those who know

can teach us

and those who don’t know

can teach us more.