To speak the truth, you need to learn it first. (Or, The Calm Before the Storm)

The light hangs green around our eyes like
some hideous parody of rose-colored glasses.
The trees
bend their backs
in a terrified homage to the storm
that encompasses them and forces their limbs
to stretch.
The sky
taunts us with images of daylight and rising suns
when in truth,
the sun is sinking ever further
towards the dark water of the horizon that we cannot see,
and all of our demons
and all of our fear
and all of our nightmares will come out tonight,
screaming,
shrieking.
Somewhere in there we might realize the truth:
the rotting, swaying zombie traipsing towards us
has our face.

The flowers have no color.
The world is coated in a wash of yellow and green that reeks
of lies and mistrust and deception.
It is a color that can never be equaled.
It is the shade of before-the-tornado and
as-the-fever-kills-us
that haunts us in our very darkest hours
and makes us wake up
screaming
with no memory of what we dreamed,
except that it was terrible.
So
very
terrible.

We cannot see clearly in this washed-out, flipped-around twilight.
All of the lines blur together and
all of the pieces overlap and
every word we hear splits into thirds—
the lie, the truth,
and the reality behind them both.
We wander in confusion,
bumping into things that may
or may not
have sprung from our hearts' greatest holes,
never knowing if that brush along our spines was
a dry, dead finger,
or only a tree branch caught in our shirt.

Perhaps that is the wort of it:
never knowing.
For the tinge in the sky cackles laughter
whenever we try to discover the truth,
filling our ears
and downing our thoughts with one sheer certainty,
one thing that never changes:
nothing is ever honest now.