Overheard

[Read Write Poem challenged us to find inspiration in something overheard. I found my inspiration on the NPR.org website, listening to interviews (nice because I could make sure I had the quote right). We were further challenged to write a prose poem. Because many of my poems read like prose (with line breaks), I was a bit challenged to keep the words in this one carefully chosen so as to stay on the poetry side of the prose poem line.]




Overheard

In a make-believe town, it’s a make-believe position. I might as well be paid in Monopoly money, all orange and blue and yellow. I put my sham-leather shoes under my ersatz-wood desk and tidy my polyester pullover. And for what?

I flirt with the truth. I fold the truth into origami so that it is sharp and cute and fits in your pocket. I trim the edges of the truth so that nothing sticks out when I cram it into today’s box. A pert plume of truth may as well be dross. When do the creases wear through on my facts, turning them into tattered fictions?

But such pretty fictions! At my coffee break I drink water flavored with delightful simulated tastes and charming false colors. I smile with my artificially-whitened tooth veneers at tanning-booth-bronzed co-workers in counterfeit friendship. My perfectly-polished acrylic nails flash in the light from full-spectrum bulbs as we wear the same weight clothes all year round, having fine-tuned the building to impersonate one unchanging season.

In a make-believe town, we may as well feign reality.