Marionette of Flesh in a Borrowed Dress
"Marionette of Flesh in a Borrowed Dress"
- Daniel Henry Rodgers
The hourglass, a skeletal jester,
mocks in the tomb's chill,
Each falling grain an emaciated sigh,
"Soon you'll cease to be."
The mirror's cold reflection,
a Gorgon's ghastly guise,
A marionette of flesh with vacant,
hollow, colorless eyes.
The worms, like pallid mourners,
watch me shrink,
A marionette of organs,
cold and pale, pink.
This flesh, a borrowed dress,
once sprightly,
Now stained and thin,
Holds tight the secrets only death can win.
This borrowed dress,
a shroud where my story's writ,
In laughter's faded stitch,
and tear's accusing slit.
A map of life etched deep,
with scars that mar the grain,
A raven of fleeting triumphs,
a pendulum of ceaseless pain.
In the shadowed hollows where sorrow resides,
I languish,
marionettes of fate's cruel designs.
Each scratch and cut a lament,
each tear a bitter sea,
Bound by the chains of my mortality.
In this borrowed dress,
I mourn what could have been,
Lost in the convulsion of my own sin.
Transformed, but not redeemed,
I drift into the void,
My spirits shattered,
my dreams destroyed.
In the silence of eternity,
I find my rest,
Lost in the bodies of my own detest.
And though this shell, a chrysalis,
soon withers,
and decays,
I cast aside the shroud,
no longer bound or worn,
Accept the endless night,
where a new self-forlorn is bourne.
Transformed, a residual relic,
through the void, I fly,
Suture with stardust catgut,
a worn scroll in the sky.
Copyright ©
Daniel Henry Rodgers
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