Veritacide

I killed her slowly, in broad daylight,

with a thousand soft deletions.

First a comma, then a clause,

then the inconvenient ribs of evidence

filed down to anecdote.

She bled statistics in the comments section,

gasped footnotes that no one read.

I dressed the wound in trending hashtags,

poured certainty like cheap champagne

until the bubbles drowned the source.

Now she lies elegant and flexible—

a body rearranged for every room.

Witnesses applaud the surgery:

How alive she looks, they say,

how relevant, how useful.

I keep a sliver of her in my pocket,

sharp enough to cut my own tongue

when the mirror asks questions.

The rest I scatter like confetti

at the festival of agreeable fictions.

Truth is dead. Long live the narrative.