Poetry

Brian Wertheim photo

By

Kathy Gibbons

Delusions of Candor

tell the truth but tell it slant

bend it

after all it’s just tangential to the tale

facts are nice but really referential

weave the threads we can believe

with some color and some sparkle

‘til the fabric of the truth hides amidst

the marvel of the tapestry

Ambiguity…

finesse the facts and fudge the timeline

characters combine to make composites

deposit myth amongst non-fiction

without arousing a suspicion

such sleight won’t catch the eye and ear

of the mostly unaware

twist the truth just like a pretzel

‘til it kind of like resembles history

Creativity…

mold the real with the imagined

the remembered the reworked

in the end perception shapes

our recollections anyway

looked at through so many eyes

life takes on a new disguise

every time it gets described

differently

Originality…

reality bites the bullet blurs the line

gets redefined or does it just evolve

as it whispers down the lane

gets etched into the cave

written on the page

burned into our brain

tales of sound and fury

signifying something

Relativity…

So we woke to find us faced with a funny sort of fact: Truth now comes in many colors, if at all.

Breath-Taking

Life would be easier if you had

a hand-to-mouth machine.

Spooning words from graceful gestures,

hand-spoons like birds.

You could summon them with

feed on outstretched palms…the birds.

They’d transform themselves to hands,

shadow puppets, spotlit wall.

They could reach, crawl, pluck ideas,

take them to your mouth to speak.

Consider-time elapsed as they grasp

for clearer meaning, as they think

then do their acrobatics, pulling thoughts

into ideas, prior to release.

*

Perhaps a noble gesture to blink,

exhale once or twice, before they fly.

But in that twinkle of the eye,

a tweet can twitter faster…

unconsidered, unrestrained, unwise,

like Icarus to sky.

Kathy Gibbons

Kathy Gibbons was born and raised in Philadelphia, and got herself to Houston for her second iteration. There, she and her husband raised their Texan son. She continues there as a stay-at-home poet and essayist, as well as a writer of microessays several of which have been featured in the journal Creative Nonfiction as “Tiny Truths.”