Lie for a Living
Never tell your age again!
Each drop
of this potent serum
will release millions of rejuvenating
molecules to your skin.
The more you live the younger
you will look.
Self aggrandizement
accounts for only 8% of habitual liars.
(BTW we are all habitual liars)
Past transgression
is a much meatier phenomenon
motivating 22% of all liars.
Their stories about the past
ensure they have been, and will remain,
the ultimate hero of their own narrative
Of course I smoked pot in college,
everybody did.
Me though, I didn’t inhale,
and I didn’t have sexual relations
with that woman in the Oval Office.
My son tells a story
where I insult his girlfriend,
unpleasantries are exchanged,
and I tell them to get out of my house.
Fabrication, whole cloth from fragments
and thin air, now woven so tight,
repeated so many times,
that his brain has changed the synapses.
When he accesses that memory engram
he recalls the scene vividly.
He tells the whole truth
and nothing but the truth.
Egregious, brazen, deceit.
Hero and habitual liar.
Just like me.
4 thoughts on "Lie for a Living"
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I think I fit into the 22% of past transgression liars. Truth is what we know it to be. Great poem.
Thanks Jim,
I am definitely in the 22 wedge of the pie also but aren’t we all getting a terrific education on how someone in the eight percent category would act if taken to an extraordinary, hyperbolic, unimaginable extreme.
‘woven so tight, his brain . . .”
It’s how we allow ourselves to live with the lie and not in fear of the next one, I guess. Truth in all its bald demands is a much more difficult mistress. Your poem tells it all.
Keep up the great work.
K. Bruce Florence
Their stories about the past
ensure they have been, and will remain,
the ultimate hero of their own narrative
So we are all liars. Great poem.