© 2006 Maurice Oliver

A Thing Or Two About "Truth"

Just for the record, most of the so-called "facts" are not true:

-Helium bars only make you "feel" weightless.

-The G-8 Summits never have occurred in the lost world.

-Fingerprints are not responsible for hollower forms of blowholes.

-Houdini never rode fourteen bloated horses while handcuffed.

-That no-trespassing sign only applies to fast-food wrappers.

-Mount Everest has never qualified as more than a chill-factor.

-Jazz is not music to eat rusted bicycle parts by.

-Singles bars do not have traplines but do have trapdoors.

-The prey of your dreams is only as good as it can float.

When The Daring Among Us Flirt

...for instance, his switchblade glinting
in brassy urban light or a big X marked in
black lipstick on a public restroom's mirror
or maybe it could simply mean let him who
never sinned cast the first stone in broad
daylight before a crowd of onlookers who
laugh jeer boo point fingers at an example
of road rage rushing towards her desert
solitude an aging actress is arrested after
slapping a cop's face in the shadow of
skyscrapers & shattered bread crumbs for
the pigeons or maybe the tabloids could tell
her housekeeper who plays solitaire with one
toe tracing the floral pattern in the carpet. 

Melancholy-Meets-Exoticism (Piano Version)

-Dawn arrives peeling off night's lingerie.

-Or marble reliefs of a goddess sniffing lotus.

-She rings my doorbell pretending to borrow sugar.

-Neat rows of houses with the lawns all mowed.

-She is barefoot with a gardenia in her hair.

-At a picnic spot by some monumental ruin.

-I tell her I have a sister named sky.

-Or a wheat field rippling in yellow.

-But instead, I offer to wash her feet.

-With piano music playing in the background.

-I pour some liquid soap in my palm.

-Or through a dusty village on camel.

-With a face that belongs on stamps.

-As rivers meander then change their course.

-Or the wind belly dancing across the dunes.

All work is copyrighted property of Maurice Oliver.

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