Children of the World
Walk silently amougst us
Carrying the weight of youth
Life has a strange way
of teaching simple lessons
through complicated people,
And eventually you start
ticking boxes.
And if you can tick enough boxes ,
Well this is where the lessons
From the college of knowledge
apply.
You see Truth is light,
or so they say
it needs no scaffolding,
no rehearsed footsteps,
no midnight revisions,
it is what it is.
But a lie?
A lie is chains around your ankles,
brick upon borrowed brick,
a landfill of unnecessary memory
built to survive
one more question.
And every liar becomes an accountant
counting words,
counting versions,
counting on the hope
that no one was truly listening,
or believing they were clever enough
to rewrite reality.
But some of us listen.
When you love, you listen.
When you care, you listen.
When you respect and value,
you listen.
Some of us were raised
not in comfort,
not with silver spoons
or trust funds waiting
but in the school of hard knocks,
where liars, cheats and let down
was just around the corner.
Children of the world.
Graduates of broken promises,
unfinished stories,
heartache, heartbreak,
and every letdown imaginable.
And it's here where we learn early
that intuition is a language.
That silence can testify.
That the smallest contradiction
can crack a polished mask,
it's not always what gets said
but what gets left out.
And if it walks like a duck,
if it quacks like a duck
well then it must be
a fucking duck
excuse the blunt expression.
No amount of poetry
will make it an eagle
and a turd remains a turd.
The truth has patience.
It does not rush.
It waits in the silent corners of years,
quiet as a mouse,
until one day without warning
it steps into the room,
hungry and impossible to ignore,
running across your very feet.
Two years later.
Five years later.
Sometimes after names are forgotten
and roads have parted,
does this change anything,
I don't think it does.
Because words once heard in care
never truly leave.
And suddenly
contradiction raises its ugly head,
The story changes,
You sit scratching your head thinking,
Mmmmmm
Again.
And in that moment,
the soul remembers what was said so deliberately.
That old instinct, burning down below
That unsettled feeling.
That whisper once dismissed
in favour of benefit and doubt.
And you say
not with bitterness,
but with the calm of someone
finally vindicated:
I knew it.
I fucking knew it.
And that saying about the truth will set you free.
Well that's depends on the you
Because truth only sets the person who was lied to free
if lies came first, and you caught out and then decide to tell some version of the the truth.
That moment to stand up and speak up in my humble view
has come and gone.
The only one set free
is the one who was deceived,
as for the liar
from experience I can say even if you chose to forgive,
from that moment forward doubt will forever live in bond with this person,
It's like a cancer that slowly erodes at your soul ,
you want to forgive but always thinking
what's stopping the next time.
Truth comes around
at the most unlikely times,
but it always finds a door
and that is the same door
trust calmly walks out of.
and another valuable lesson I've learnt
you can't buy trust,
and
Lies bury themselves
one sentence at a time.
We are creatures of habit.
If you tell lies often enough,
you become better at deception.
But the same is true of truth.
Speak honestly enough,
and it becomes second nature.
Honesty is discipline.
Deception is too.
One builds trust.
The other performs it.
And habits reveal character.
A person who truly cares
does not forget your words,
They carry them.
Turn them over.
Notice when they no longer fit.
The ones who ask how your day was
and remember the answer tomorrow
those are the dangerous ones to lie to.
Because they are not collecting conversation,
they are listening with care.
They are collecting truth.
Love is to listen.
To listen is to love.
Combined,
that is a power few understand
and even fewer practice.
we rather intentionally forget
or create a sugar coated version
where it's always someone else
to blame.
I could have carried any truth in relationships, in friendships
however painful,
however raw.
But I would never carry a lie.
if someone can lie about small things
you can be sure truth will never follow
the bigger things.
And for that lesson,
I am grateful.
For the hard roads.
For the sharpened instincts.
For the ability to spot a duck,
And most of all
for the strength to walk away.
Because today 5 years later,
when the curtain finally fell
and the performance ended,
I looked back
at the vows,
the declarations,
the theatre of sacred promise
and performance.
and understood:
the regret was never mine.
I lost nothing
except the time I chose to believe
but illusion faded
and it could have been today
where the truth set me free.
As for the other person
they lost the rarest thing
this life can give
someone who saw them clearly,
gave them the chance to be real,
and still loved them as they were.
That was the gift.
And they traded it
for fiction,
and
For comfort in the moment.
For the temporary shelter
of a lie.
But in the end,
truth remained.
And with it,
freedom.
Because no matter how certain I was,
there was always that shadow of doubt,
had my decision been in haste
was my mind playing tricks on me
maybe I was paranoid,
maybe I was wrong.
But today,
that doubt is gone,
this was is a weight I never realized
I carried for the past 5 years
And I know this much:
just because you are paranoid
doesn’t mean
they were not out to get you.
There is a saying that was taught in my life
It says ,
The wise old owl
sat on an oak.
The more he heard,
the less he spoke.
The less he spoke,
the more he heard.
And we should strive
to be like that old bird.
And you thought there would be no poetry in this piece !!