All The Way Down - Dec 18 2024

 

All The Way Down

Dec 18 2024



Will it be hard truths

or soft illusions?

The first is a cold monastic cell

with one small slit

you can barely reach on tip-toe

letting in a glimpse of light.

The other is a penthouse suite,

looking down

through floor-to-ceiling glass

at the tops of clouds.

Where a 5-star chef

open bar

and plush king-sized bed

await your pleasure,

a discreet concierge

will cater to your every need.

But nothing in the middle?

No soft truths

as easy to live with

as any comforting belief,

yet as immutable

and universal

as the hard ones are?

Simple truths

you needn’t suffer for.

Unlike the penitent

in his ascetic cell

who can never be pure enough;

seeking forgiveness,

whipping himself

for sinful thoughts,

plunging day and night

into baths of ice

to demonstrate his piety

cool manly desire.

Who sleeps on a hard wooden board

in a corner of his cell,

one thin blanket

to keep him warm.

Welcome truths,

because life

with all its hardships

is beautiful all the same,

and reality

more than enough.

Because facts are facts,

and their certainty

as reassuring

as the ground you’re standing on.

While illusions are ephemeral.

The plush bed

that swallows you up

until there’s no escaping its clutch.

The cloud

that never clears;

just more cloud

all the way down

for as far as it goes.

There were lots of complicated thoughts filling my head I was tempted to wrestle into a poem. But then, skimming through some articles, I glimpsed the words hard truths, and immediately wondered why the truth is so often considered hard. Can’t truth be liberating, illuminating, even comforting? And what, if things are strictly binary, would be the opposite? Soft illusions, of course! Hard and soft seemed ripe for metaphor.

It seems especially important to assert the there are immutable and universal truths in a time when everyone seems entitled to their own facts (such as climate change isn’t real); a time when shameless politicians feel free to either rewrite history, or simply cram it down some collective memory hole (such as Jan 6 2021 was not an insurrection and no one died).

But such thoughts came to me as I wrote, or after. In fact, all I had to begin with was this unexamined expression — hard truths — and a desire to riff on it, letting my stream of consciousness take me by the hand going who knows where. Most poems start like this: I rarely have any plan; no idea how they’ll end.