aletheia

I learned to listen
from a man who lost everything
to a gambler on a train —
the cards, the odds, the math of when to walk away.
Kenny said it plain.
No footnotes.

Ronnie sang
with sunglasses over the eyes that failed him
and still saw more than most men
standing in full light.
George Jones drove a lawnmower
to the liquor store
and nobody had to explain
what that meant about a man
and his particular gravity toward ruin.

Three chords.
And the truth.
That was the whole contract.

---

Now I open my phone
and the world is offering me
seventeen versions of the same afternoon,
each one more certain than the last,
each one built for the part of me
that wants to be right
more than I want to know something.

The algorithms have learned
that outrage travels faster than sorrow,
and a man will scroll past beauty
to stop at a thing that makes his blood move.
So they feed us that.
a steady diet of just.that.

I don’t know anymore
what the weather actually was
in a place I wasn’t.
I don’t know
whose grief was real
and whose was performed for the camera
that was always already there, waiting for the shot.
I don’t know
what I don’t know,
which is the oldest problem in the world,
newly renovated.

---

But it’s still as crystal as the day it happened:

a voice coming through the dash
on a two-lane highway somewhere in Missouri,
and my mother turning it up
without saying why,
and both of us just
basking in it.

No one was trying to sell me anything.
The song knew it was going to end.
The song was not afraid
to name the thing
by its right name
and then let it marinate
a while
before the next song…

That was the whole arrangement.
Three chords.
the truth.
And faith
that the truth
was enough.