Truth Ecology

(a long prose poem/lyric essay)


"A lie cannot live" - Martin Luther King Jr


The truth tries to hide in the wide blue sky. Snickers behind a thicket so thick one cannot see through to the other side. Sidles up to a small child and says "Boo!" in order to surprise. But truth cannot lie, cannot get away with trying to be other than what it is. A naked emperor, an oil slick; truth, whether sick or well, dispels all lies. The sun sword of truth cuts through lying fog, clouds and storms. Truth may be camoflauged for awhile, wear a black cloak, in a dark alley, on vacation or put in a dusty trunk for a decade, but it cannot die. No matter how stifled, dried up, left to wink out like an exploding star it is, truth cannot *not* exist.

A lie, on the other hand, cannot live. Sometimes it survives a while, wearing oxygen masks of truth. Hiding behind the pink elephant in the room. Secreted away in the cellar, held under cinder blocks and fed special meats so one day it will grow strong and conquer. But as soon as lies see the light, as soon as they grow limber, they fall like rotten timber, lost amongst other wasted untruths.

In the mixed use forest of life, lies are the fodder that feed the truth. They become rotten matter, broken down into less than bones and flesh. Lies only have second lives in the form of truthful tree trunks, youthful vines and the sun that turns both green. When truth dies, it never really goes away, given over to the neutral ground which feeds the beetles who breed and shit out more fertilizer for truth to speed up from. As sprouts and shoots, the weak new truths are equally vulnerable and shot down, stomped upon, shut out from the sun they so need. Yet, unlike lies, which must die, the truth never subsides (though it may hibernate) never disappears, never fear.

In the vast open space of sky the truth glimmers, invisible as the actual horizon, which only grows further away, bigger, more open and without end the closer you try to get to it. Even the astronauts, so surprised at the sight of their own earth as they ventured out to find other truths in space, could not see all of the horizon. The fact is that whether flat or rounded or spherical; the truth, like the horizon, is without shape. When cutout clouds cover the sky they prove how temporary shapes are, how impossible a life as anything other than shapeless space is. Just ask a satellite, a telescope, a telephone, a radio - anything that seems to transmit lies. Deep underneath all we think we see and hear, the vibrations are clear as day, as truthful as space itself, without form, without bias, without shape.

Though all that space is endless, it has no air for lies. Lies choke on themselves like light-blocking vines, roped into rassles, lost in the hustle and bustle of themselves. You can know the space of truth, as it always emerges from the tussle of lies on the ground, proud even if wilted, withered or worn.

A living lie is living a lie, for a lie cannot live. The very idea of its life as a lie is a lie. Even after a lie is dead we still give it weight. A corpse on the ground, unable to move. We mistake it for a mountain at first, solid and real. But the further we move away from a dead lie, the more we see around it. The more time insists, the less we resist and the more the lie fades, until we see that what we thought were cliffs are only clouds, and beyond those mists, truth and space perpetually persist.