2 New Poems by Janice Dempsey

THE ART OF LYING

The art of lying is a gentle one –

truth’s so often hard to give or take.

Lying can be kind, when all’s said and done.

Your smallest lies you can tell on your phone –

sincerity is not so hard to fake –

the art of lying is a gentle one.

Go further, lie bare-faced in even tones,

look people in the eye, refuse to break

bad news – perhaps, when all is said and done,

when truth’s unwelcome, a cocked gun

that must be turned aside for pity’s sake –

the art of lying is a gentle one.

Lie cleverly, sustain lies once begun –

with reputation, wealth and fame at stake

are those lies kind, when all is said and done?

I said I’ll love you always to someone,

made promises I later had to break.

Is the art of lying a gentle one?

Lying’s seldom kind, when all’s said and done.

AGORAPHILIA

The diagnosis was undisputed.

I took to London’s streets, not homeless

but at home only with strangers.

Addicted, I queued hours for theatres

that I feared to enter,

rode the Circle Line all night.

I boarded a train at Euston:

the Highlands’ silence soothed me.

The eighteenth century had cleared

a space for sufferers like me.

I pressed on further north

where flotillas of cruise-ships

jostled in melted ice-fields

carrying populations away

from the shrinking land.

In Berlin, Washington, Moscow,

I roamed ruined streets alone.

Cleansed by authoritarian laws,

teeming cities were scoured of crowds,

California, Brazil, Australia, Africa

already lost in flames, Antarctica

now a dwindling suburb of the Equator.

I long for the final clearance.

I’ll find Nirvana in the huge horizons

of this barren planet.