The most telling word in "Truths and Lies" is one that never appears: lies. The title promises a pair, yet the poem gives us only the vocabulary surrounding falsehood: "whispers," "Rumors," "what was and isn't real." The lie is everywhere in the atmosphere and nowhere in the text, which is exactly how rumor works. Even the one capitalised "Truths" sits inside the phrase "unspoken Truths," so the true things are silent while the false ones do all the talking.
The opening is deliberately vague. "I hear you say it / It rung in my ears": neither the "it" nor the "you" is ever identified, so the reader stands where the speaker stands, knowing something painful was said without knowing exactly what. Then comes the correction: "But it was whispers." What rang like a direct statement turns out to be secondhand murmur. The nonstandard "rung" (for "rang") gives the start a raw, jotted-down feel, closer to a thought caught mid-feeling than to a polished statement.
The central image is "Knives thrown into darkness." Nobody aims in the dark, and the harm lands anyway. The next line, "Shattering the imagination," mixes its metaphors, since knives pierce while glass shatters. The mix works, though. It makes the imagination something brittle, a mirror that breaks once rumor has hit it, and the following line shows the damage: "What was and isn't real." The tenses split between "was" and "isn't," so even the past becomes unreliable.
Midway the poem turns from sound to sight. "Beyond the lips / Hidden in unwavering eyes" sends us away from speech, where the rumors live, toward the eyes, where something truer might be found. "Unwavering" is ambiguous, though. Steady eyes might signal honesty, or they might simply be good at concealing. The poem doesn't say which, and that fits a speaker who can no longer trust what she or he sees or hears.
The metaphors then shift from blades to flame. "The truth of the soul / Burns only when touched." Knives are thrown from a distance, but fire requires contact, so the danger changes from being attacked to getting close to what is real. This is the logic behind the speaker's retreat: "I hide / I don't want to get burned." The line "I hide" is the shortest in the poem, almost hiding in its own white space. What follows, "Circling me with devastation," has no clear grammatical anchor. It could describe the rumors, the fire, or the speaker's own wall of defences. That floating quality suggests a ring of fire, with hiding as both shelter and enclosure.
Then the last line reverses everything: "I don't want to hide." It repeats the structure of "I don't want to get burned" but points the opposite way, so the poem ends on two wishes that cannot both be granted. Safety costs openness, and openness risks pain. Nothing resolves, and the poem stops mid-tension.
The form supports this. There is no rhyme and no regular meter, and the lines are short, mostly three to six words, each sitting alone like a separate whisper. There is no end punctuation, so sentences leak into one another. "Beyond the lips / Hidden in unwavering eyes / The truth of the soul" can be read several ways depending on where you pause, which mirrors the confusion of trying to sort rumor from fact. The sibilance in "whispers," "Shattering" and "imagination" also quietly recreates the hiss of gossip.
What gives the poem its significance is where it puts its attention. It doesn't take revenge on the rumor-spreader or defend itself with an argument. It stays with the person on the receiving end and shows the second injury that comes after the first, the self-protective withdrawal that feels necessary and still feels like a loss. By ending without an answer, it admits that this is a real dilemma, and it gives readers an honest picture of being caught between hiding and getting burned.