the naked truth redux (audio poetry 3:59)

This post first appeared here on September 22, 2016.

Perhaps this is more than you wish to hear

That your origins began eons before you were assigned this body
That people around you are holograms or
laboratory-created hominoids,
When you voiced questions there were no answers
Until you stopped asking and simply accepted
everything you were told

It came at you from all directions
Out of the mouths of those assigned to raise you up
When, in fact, they wielded the power to hold you down
There is no blame; they knew no better and some perhaps
wondered themselves yet could not speak aloud
for fear of being forever silenced –

The words and images and strictures oozed and screamed
at you from boxes plugged into the wall
and from projection screens
and the heavy-lidded eyes of others who, like you,
had stopped asking questions
content to swallow basketsful of lies and stories
that seemed to be about you, but not really

You may not want to hear any of this
Even though you have flirted with these possibilities, yes?
Perhaps while you were a child,
a bundle of curiosity and delight swaddled
in a blanket woven of distortion and interference-

Shaking your head in disbelief will not dislodge
the naked truth now come a-calling
You have peeked around shadowy corners,
peered into mirrors upon mirrors,
ranted and railed against enemies
perceived and real, within and without

You armed yourself with a small butter knife when the digging
required a corps of engineers wearing headlamps and operating
heavy earth-and-sky-moving equipment
You signed up for a mission that has taken down lesser beings,
It is all too easy to slip back into the fool’s paradise
our consensual somnambulism helped to create

It is time to acknowledge you know this to be true:
In your quietest moments, in places and times where you sense
that angels and fairies and orbs of rainbow light dance
and sing songs of jubilation,

As you splay yourself upon the earth and synchronize her heartbeat
unto yours and feel and know and remember your own soul
coalescing with the vast, immeasurable essence of All-That-Is,
You have caught glimmers of truth as they gently
swarm your face and tickle your ears
As fragile veils that had mired you in perpetual blindness dissolve
and you feel a new breeze licking at your lips and
sweetly brushing against your flesh

Honor those moments, those star visitors, that moon,
those intense beams of sunlight that warm and carry you
from the wearisome plodding of the worldly and mundane
Your heart yearns to be heard, now, and forever

This truth is unimpeachable
Even though today, of all days,
This may be more than you wish to hear