“Fair Faces and the Lie”
They crawled through nights like men flayed to the bone,
Each thought a wound that never learned to clot.
No glory crowned them; no soft hand had shown
Its warmth their way. The world remembered not.
A siren truth screamed suddenly inside—
Gas! GAS!—the law that split their faith in two:
That only sculpted faces won the tide,
While they were left to drown in thinning view.
Their “copes” ran dry like canteens in the dust—
The games that once gave shelter turned to ash;
No joy remained in pixels they could trust,
No comfort sparked from each exhausted clash.
On the web the trenches filled again
With men too tired to lift their inner dead;
Each coping mechanism snapped like men
Whose boots have rotted clean from flesh and tread.
They’d swallowed every sermon they were told:
Take showers. Hit the gym. Work hard each day.
Be gentle. Clean your room. Be brave. Be bold.
But each command fell limp along the way.
For what are jobs, or soap, or iron bars raised high,
Or tidy rooms where lonely hearts reside—
Against the fatal truth that scorched the sky
The night they watched the world choose only pride?
One stumbled, choking on that bitter flare—
The ugly knowledge swallowing his youth:
That all the virtues polished with such care
Meant nothing next to beauty’s brutal truth.
His eyes rolled wide as though they’d glimpsed a hell
Reserved for those deemed unadorned, unfit;
His breath hitched like a ruptured blasting shell
Detonating somewhere deep in it.
And all around, men gagged on the same smoke—
The knowledge that no labour, prayer, nor plan,
No scent of soap, no weights their shoulders broke,
Would lift them to the light of “favoured man.”
If you could hear the dragging of their lungs,
The thick, wet bubbling grief that strips them bare—
If you could taste the metal on their tongues
As hope corrodes in poisoned midnight air—
You would not tell them gentle nursery lies,
Nor say that “love will come to all who try.”
To men who drown in truth before your eyes,
Such comforts are a cruelty passing by.
The old lie—
“Looks do not choose the ones who live unloved.”
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