Truths

They came yesterday
and unwittingly I let them in
after all, what had I to fear from friends?

It must have been while I was sleeping
they made those deep deliberate cuts
into my past.

They were looking for malignant truths.
You can't live with them.
They have to come into the open.

I didn't even know what they'd done
till they showed me the ugly truth,
limp in a dish like a still-born.

"You've got to be cruel to be kind,"
they said.
They said lots of things.

But the wound never healed
and the truth ... it lay and rotted
like Adam's apple.

2 November, 1986

Jim Maddocks