POETRY
Deception and Desire
Unraveling the Story of Hannah and Seth
Hannah, a childhood friend,
told Seth to lie on the couch.
He’d lied his entire life.
Seth lied at first but moved
to sit upright
in the maroon leather chair.
Seth promised himself to keep
one promise and face her tears.
He knew there’d be tears.
Seth sat in the beige room
with soft jazz playing
and a waterfall
on the coffee table.
Hannah had it in her to root
out his fear of free-falling
from weathered relationships.
A whirl caused a wind and more
than a month went by before
a whirlwind romance dug its heels
into his heart and broke apart
as quickly as it started.
Seth hit each branch on his downfall
each bruising more than before.
Seth decided on the single life
for over a year, but he still wanted,
no, he needed what he wanted.
Hannah’s voice, tinted with charm,
moved through the receiver,
sweet like an apple pie candle.
American to the core,
but Southern at birth.
Hannah’s brilliant lies behind
her oval, blue eyes draped
secrecy with a fist-shaking
attention span, not to believe
a word she said;
only what she said made
sense — much more sense
than his friends did.
If Hannah fell from a tree,
would the forest of shyness
agree to tell the keepers
of reason that an angel
had met her bitter end?
Seth told Hannah what
he could about he’d come
to love without condition.
And what he knew
about her was nothing
more than a cut love scene
in a blockbuster movie.
This truth was everything but true.
Hannah believed Seth,
and his eyes welled, and drops
rolled down his cheeks with each blink.
A lie held a mirror to Seth’s face.
Hannah had his heart and the only
one hiding it was him.
(© 2024 AC)
(Amazon Kindle, Spillwords, The Writers Club)
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