An Honest Liar

I met a certain man yesterday.

Who spoke for hours long,

With no pretense.

About poets, their verses.

And paintings and artists,

And singers and their lives.

 

Of strange obsessions,

And compelling addictions,

Of his little crush,

On the lady death,

And of all the urges he cannot tame.

 

He meets you in the lines you pen,

And tells you he gets it,

The empty longings,

The emotional rollercoasters,

The love for forbidden,

And all that you feared to tell the world.

 

He kept me awake with the tales of his wounds,

The tales that make him a human,

Of an exquisite kind.

A fine departure from all the others,

An honest liar,

Shouting words of truth and penance,

At the infinite moments of darkness.

 

A certain delusional young man,

Who suffers from the wrath of his own conscience,

Who grieves in silence,

For all the friends who traveled far,

And families that fell apart,

And women who gave up,

And places that wore him out.

 

He whispers into my ears,

“You scare me!

For you believe in no atonement,

For you seek to murder murderers,

You deny, that all the men, you wish to hang at the marketplace,

Deep, deep, deep, down hold a heart that beats.”

 

But I, “I know”, He says,

“For, I walked with them too,

For, I was one of them too.

But my dear, how I wish I hadn’t begun all that I began!

I’m left with little, so little if you had known all that I had.

I have been a weak man,

Of the strongest kind.

And all of it has taken a toll,

On all that I had.”

 

As he sits there alone,

And waiting for his little crush

To come looking for him in depths,

How I wish to tell him to hold onto his self,

That the world outside is beautiful,

And that bigger love will happen,

And severed ties shall mend,

And that second chances, third chances,

And infinite chances are allowed,

For men who sin, and yet repent.

And that all you ever wanted,

will come looking for you.