Political Poem: The Weave, by Grady VanWright

They scuttle, thin-boned sentinels of sameness,
eyes like magnifying glasses,
tongues tasting the air for errors,
fingers bent to scold.
“Not quite,” they mutter,
scratching notes in the margins of my magic.
“Untrue,” they insist,
as if stars must justify their arrangement.

Who are they, these custodians of order,
to call my phoenix
a disguised pigeon
because it roosts on reality’s roof?

Release me from this prison of numbers.
Let clocks spiral backwards,
hands pirouetting to the beat of disbelief.
Why must the ground
stay beneath my feet?
Why must the sky
tattle on the wings of my words?

Let me build cathedrals of nonsense–
arches of implausibility,
stained-glass windows
colored with unprovable dreams.
What harm in rivers that dissolve sadness
or bees that whisper forgotten names?
But no–here come the fact-checkers,
armed with the weights of certainty,
demanding receipts.

They drag me down
with their leaden notebooks and fussy questions:
“Did it happen?”
“Where’s the source?”
“Who saw it, and when?”

What dull creatures,
with spines straight as rulers,
lips pursed like staplers.
Truth, they say, must be a polished mirror.
I say it’s a shadow in a carnival funhouse.
Why must my lies–no, my liberations–
be caged?

Fact-checking is the end of joy.
A guillotine for the impossible,
an autopsy on wonder.
I want a world unmeasured, unweighed, untrue–
where gravity forgets its job
and oceans spill over their edges
to water thirsty stars.

You call me liar,
as if the word could shatter me.
But I am the jester unbound,
the architect of shimmering fictions.
I braid contradictions in my hair,
wear a tie knotted with riddles,
lace my boots with plausible denials.

Who am I?
I am the shadow casting no light,
the smoke wearing a crown.
/ Poetry Manuscript / 3
Destroy fact-checking,
and I am no longer a liar–
I am free.