How Truth Should Lie

we wrote a poem once, he and I, pondering how truth should lie
five and a half verses, adding up to six, computing how truth should lie

we wrote in the winter, in the heat of youth, quills dipped in twilight wells,
couplets on hunger, faith and death, questioning how truth should lie

the world lay like an old jigsaw game, half its pieces lost over time,
we stripped words to fit the empty shapes, realising how truth should lie

but the wind carried the cadaverous stench of failure from fear to fear
the unspoken held its puckered nose, decrying how truth should lie

together we sat, he, the poem and I, and a moon with its silver mask,
filling days into burlap sacks of night, accepting how truth should lie

while real tomorrows switched places with refurbished yesterdays

lies showed how to frame the truth, declaring how truth should lie.

 

In Ghazal form