the illusion of truth

When I was young I searched the sky for someone at the wheel, A hidden hand behind the wound that time would one day heal. I thought the cracks in everything were failures in design, That somewhere stood a perfect mind arranging yours and mine. I learned the names of heaven first, then learned the names of fear, And every story told to me made distant judgment clear. That good would rise, that evil fall, that justice held its breath, That somewhere waited balance at the borderlines of death. So I began to sort the world like stones upon a scale, Where every act was either light or written up as failure. And in that sorting something grew I didn’t recognize, A comfort in the certainty of drawing clean dividing lines. But history does not obey the shapes we want to see, It moves like smoke through broken hands, indifferent to decree. I watched as men who spoke of peace would light the fires first, And those they named as monsters sometimes quenched the worst thirst. I watched the same exacted pain be called both right and wrong, Depending on which uniform the speaker marched along. And slowly, without warning, without thunder, without sign, The categories started to dissolve inside my mind. Not all at once, not cleanly, but like ink in moving water, Until I couldn’t tell the saint from executioner or martyr. The devil never needed horns, no throne, no molten gate, He only needed certainty to sanctify the hate. The angels didn’t fall from clouds with fire in their eyes, They simply stood in silence while we justified our lies. And I began to see the flaw was never in the blade, But in the hand convinced it struck for some divine parade. The world was never split in two by cosmic black and white, It was divided by the stories we repeat to make it right. Because every side becomes a god when pressed into a war, And every god demands a truth worth killing for. So tell me where the evil lives, if not in what we do, When every faction swears the same: “The righteous are but few.” I searched for something absolute, a line that would not bend, But every line I drew dissolved before it reached its end. There was no throne above us watching every rise and fall, No ledger in the sky that wrote the meaning of it all. No voice that named the chosen ones, no trumpet in the air, No final judge descending from an empty golden chair. Only people teaching people what they claim the truth must be, And children born into the flame of inherited decree. And if there is a darkness here, it is not something sent, It’s born from need to make the world fit neat interpretation. To turn confusion into law, uncertainty to blade, To make a simple enemy from every choice we’ve made. So I stopped asking who was right, and stopped asking who was wrong, Because both can sing the same refrain and call it holy song. I do not see a hidden war between the cursed and blessed, I see a frightened human race trying to pass a test. And failing it in pieces, through every age and land, Not because of some great beast—but because we understand Too well how to divide ourselves, how to name the other side, How to turn misunderstanding into treason, hate, and pride. So if you ask me now what rule this broken world obeys, I’ll say it isn’t heaven’s law or hell’s infernal gaze. It’s the stories that we choose to hold too tightly in our hands, Until they cut so deep we forget they’re made of sand. No throne above us. No war below. Only us. And what we decide to call “the truth” before we let it go.