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| Don't piss off the Blue Fairy! |
I have a new poem for today. It was inspired by something that happened at the medical office where I work. A patient told the nurses a lie, and, because of his lie, he ended up spending the entire day waiting for his wife to come pick him up after his surgery. The man, who was in his fifties, was humiliated and humbled, and his wife, who was working, had to leave her job and drive two hours to discharge him. She was not amused.
It got me thinking how even the tiniest of white lie can cause huge problems. Think about it. Bill Clinton was impeached by the House of Representatives because he didn't come clean about his affair with Monica Lewinsky. Countries have gone to war because of lies. Marriages have ended because of lies. People have woken up on beaches naked because of lies. (OK, that may just be me, but it happened.) My son, who is only two, has already started to deny things that are obviously true. Just last night, I asked him if he'd taken a bath. He looked up at me, with muddy cheeks and dirty hands, and said, "Yeah." The impulse to lie is built into all of us at a very young age, I guess.
That's what this poem is about. Brace yourself. It's another language poem.
Saint Marty has had a much better day today. Honest.
Lies
Presidents do it, bear false witness,
Dupe, dissemble, dissimulate
About weapons of mass destruction,
Dresses stained with seminal fluid.
Husbands do it to wives, wives to husbands,
Boyfriends to girlfriends and vice versa,
Repeat disinformation, deceptions, distortions,
Fictions, myths, tales about old/current lovers,
Romeos, Juliets, flames, fuckbuddies.
Guys do it all the time, invent whoppers
Regarding the size of fish, trout, salmon,
The size of penises, manhoods, members.
Women won’t come clean about age or weight,
Density or mass, poundage or size.
My daughter, in the throes of adolescence,
Misleads, misinforms, misspeaks,
Misstates, misrepresents, maligns
In her quest for cell phones and laptops,
Sleepovers, makeup and piercings.
My two-year-old son does it, fibs,
Fudges, fabricates, fakes when I ask him
If he’s soiled his diaper, says “no”
Although the room reeks of bowel,
Methane, manure, shit. Even a wooden
Puppet does it, cons, concocts,
Beguiles, equivocates, perjures,
Plants, prevaricates, snows, soft-soaps
In his need to be a real boy, not
Realizing, by calumny and subterfuge,
He’s just as human as the rest of us,
Regardless of the length or timber of his nose.
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