Midtruth

You will realize at midnight
that the poem becomes rotten
fruit or a car left
on the roadside,
not a group of phrases but a long
whimper into something unsaid
the wrong way around the corner
taking lip from someone else
from another speech growing
into, then growling, into another
speech, steady
into midnight the poem, taken a different
direction wraps, flings itself into a modern
heresy, to say,
it's not the same thing.