Lies are the only way to understand this world
—leaves turn into trees, birds becoming skies—
‘Til finally we’d pay any price
To keep the other versions at bay
—the sky is green, as every one of us is a sun—
Our stories hang like shadows on the light of never knowing
How else can we the blind find out our way?
We tell stories to steal time—when we know there is no time,
We tell stories to steal words—when we know there are no words,
To steal the fire of who we are—when we don’t know who to be,
And to steal what we desire—when we don’t know what to want.
We tell stories to remember what we never knew at all
And to forget what we were born to never lose.
The stories wrap us up like blankets of warm judgment
Condemning what’s too painful to accept:
That the world that’s full of people cannot fit inside our block
In surrogates, in symbols, to make us think that we’re caught up,
That the clumps of dirt we gather are not distinct from earth's remainder,
That the storm won’t move too fast for any one of us to see,
That the gods we seek are closer than we know.
Our homes are lovely forgeries, we’ve built them with what we believe,
Their beams bend with the promise that some truth will fill its frame
Like spirit fills the universe of stars, and we cast from it our arch
possessive eye
On ideas spread like mushrooms, that keep alive the hopelessness,
The dark and moistened prayer for that one time that we almost saw
The Truth to come again, as if that would alone be just enough
For the myths to make us Gods enough to believe in one,
To hear in distant music a life that no longer exists,
That never existed except as what we lost before we got here,
Striking likenesses together for the palest glimpse of fire,
Exaggerated shadows and the light ever invisible.
We will not stop 'til the echo of our artificial and conditional
Conversations become the very currency of heaven,
‘Til the inhuman falseness that the Gods despise becomes at last
The reaching down in mercy that we know comes out of desperate lies.
