Better Lies Poem by Danny Casteen

If I were a writer, I would learn to tell better lies,
Fictions of self-sacrifice, undying love, body and blood

Condensed and dripped in ink-blue dreams from this pen,
Not the mean and muddy runnels of diffuse dissipated visions

But lucid prattling brooks, twin entendre streams,
Surface tension splashing, slipping, spilling over commas like mossy boulders,

Swelling, gaining mass and cohesion, momentum and blind purpose,
Merging into turgid rivers that surge through desert country,

Sprouting irrigation-ditch tendrils of ambiguity that stretch in straight-ruled lines
Toward remote horizons, parallel and convergent there.

But still they flow south, down to the sea of my creation,
Flood tidewater stanzas and paragraph deltas, deposit silted brackish erudition.

And I would gaze out from the white shore of my ocean of pretense,
mold golems of duplicitous forms,

Play with them like laughing children
In the low murmuring curl of my waves,

Track them through aesthetic skies as they soar and glide.
Cogent torpid wings on crafted gusts,

Pursue cetacean thoughts,
Arching backs into the deep azure welcoming.

And finally, weave these schemes like bright filaments,
Long and intricate, fine-meshed, cast along the shore.

And so capture some true thing. Spill out that paradox
Onto that literal sand, flashing silver in my heedful sun.

And when I could do this thing I would seek you out,
Find you again in some new shining place,

And you would love me again
With the selfish giving heart of a child.