My Bag of Lies
By John Herlihy

In my pocket,
I carry a bag of lies.
They foster false impressions,
That I truly despise.
But I can’t help myself,
Should I just sit on life’s shelf?
Perpetuating one big lie,
That I am a simple, innocent elf?

A litany of lies,
They force us to compromise.
We pretend to be someone else,
Like snow, the images just melt.
The list of our dishonest endeavors,
Just hopelessly and fatally severs,
What good we raise to the surface,
To capture in a thimble our true purpose.

Lies, lies, and more lies,
They just darken our skies.
They prevent revealing who we are,
Like the false twinkle of a distant star.
In a vast, all-encompassing darkness,
That knows nothing at all of kindness,
They create life’s truth in masquerade;
The evils of the world swagger on parade.

Even my silence
Becomes a form of compliance,
Hiding my despair,
In a hush of false air,
Pretending to be happy,
When in fact I am sad.
Silence can be a lie,
That loud noise cannot amplify

Why can’t we just say,
Without more falsehood to pay,
That a lie is just a mistake,
That we inadvertently create.
To be something we are not;
To have something that goes to rot.
We think of our lies as a form of play;
In the end, we simply give ourselves away.