smoke & mirrors

We live on borrowed whispers,
fragments of truth slipping through
the sieve of memory—
smoothed by longing,
splintered with the lies
we never chose.

Our minds are architects,
sketching blueprints
of the never-was,
etching corners where time folds,
forgetting the chaos beneath.

What we remember:
a blurred reflection,
a ripple in the water,
and the place we ache to return to—
nothing but mist.

The lies—
those that sprouted long before us,
rooted in centuries of dust—
are marrow,
the myth we mistake for spine.
Unchecked, they twine like ivy,
tender and suffocating.

Some dig,
fingers raw with yearning,
chasing glimmers
of what might have been real.
They lift their findings skyward—
glass shards
gleaming in fractured light.

The crowd averts its gaze.
Truth is an unkempt thing,
less luminous than a well-told fable.

Still, we clutch
to shadows, to stories, to half-truths
cradled in their almostness.
And when we peel back the layers,
what we find is not a verdict,
but a question:
What if we are both?
Both truth and illusion,
adrift and anchored,
broken and becoming.

And isn’t that enough?

If you made it this far, click that itty-bitty digital organ! ❤️