My Only,
lie is not silence.
Silence is willful absence,
while lies, like truths,
are engagements, beholden bits,
requiring not only courage
but compassion, feeling.

"Retract," "recant," "forsake"—
echoes of a language I have heard before
but never spoken (syllables I'd surely choke on);
to cover over (as with a scab)
is mere preliminary to real healing,
which makes whole the broken,
raises the corpse, joins and knits,
restarts the growing.

My only truth has been silence—
thus I forsake me,
dreaming, waking, dreaming
aching
interred with my memory in a shallow grave
deeply felt
mounded with fashion's detritus.

Now pursing lips preach disapprovingly from presumed heights
of superior understanding, of omniscient knowing,
whispering the lie of silence broken
to discredit those lesser deities who dare seared in perfervidity
to seek meager harvests in fields ever fertile though long fallow
(fields which would warm to spring's promise of renewal, emboldened,
yet hold back fearing still winter's false release
and fierce, indiscriminate pruning:
earnest blossoms, be they bounteous and unwithered,
cannot hold back the freeze
if the chill winds choose again to blow).

Silence is a coin spoiled
when spent for show to achieve no purchase,
squandered to buy no good.