Fiction Poem by RIC BASTASA

Tel me what is your recently invented pretense
Your latest lie?

Shape, form, color, texture,
Of your many selves like your unequal fingers
More than the number
Of your allowable toes,

Feign and feign
That is feigning
Feign in feigning
Fingers like other fingers,

The shape
Of your fingers

You make things up
You invent new stories
And without any excuses
At all, like a very clever man loving many women
At the same time,

Figment, fabric, fabricate fabrics
To entertain, you are justifying, just to entertain, not to
Deceive
To lure them to glorify themselves
To believe about some goodness and beauty and the
Truth so well expressed in fiction,

In the field of imagination things work themselves into human beings
The cows talk in affable fables, the characters talk about avarice, love, hate,
And murders done in fiction,
We learn a lot,

And in that vast field of fiction
You are the cicada singing
Alone
To a cold and dark night
Wishing to be
A black bird, the one that flies and sings
And goes to places where
You have never been.