Masks Fall
They came clothed in borrowed suns,
faces lacquered with borrowed light,
voices tuned to thunder
yet hollow as gourds after harvest.
Crowns rang upon their brows,
but rang like tin, not gold.
Greatness rehearsed itself in mirrors,
and believed the applause of glass.
I saw princes stitched from rumor,
paupers padded with velvet lies,
their pockets full of titles,
their souls light as ash.
They learned the posture of eagles
without the patience of wings,
spoke fluent destiny
yet stuttered at truth.
Scholars they claimed to be,
architects of thought,
but their libraries were staged—
spines unbroken, margins untouched,
wisdom photocopied, never bled for.
They recited footnotes like prayers
and prayed like actors,
confusing cadence for conviction,
syntax for substance.
In sanctuaries of spectacle
they lifted hands heavy with performance,
eyes closed to heaven,
open to the crowd.
Scripture became costume,
devotion a dialect learned for gain.
They sang of the cross
but fled the nails,
preached surrender
while negotiating thrones.
O how the age loves costume kings,
how it crowns echoes and calls them voices,
how it baptizes noise as influence.
Nobody learned the choreography of fame
and called it arrival,
a candle demanding to be named a sun,
a puddle insisting it is sea.
Even gods were forged from smoke,
false thunders mimicking the Almighty,
idols fluent in miracles that never healed,
oracles who sold tomorrow
while bankrupt in today.
They thundered “I am”
without trembling,
forgetting that even Moses removed his shoes.
But time, patient and unbribable,
is a skilled undresser.
Wind arrives. Rain asks questions.
Fire examines motives.
And masks, exhausted from pretending,
begin to crack.
Paint peels. Gold flakes.
The borrowed light returns to its owner.
Then silence speaks.
The true are not loud;
they are deep.
They do not announce their faith;
it leaks from their living.
They carry wisdom like old wells,
drawn by those who thirst,
never advertised by signs.
When masks fall, it wounds.
Shame bleeds. Illusions scream.
But in the rubble, windows appear.
Air enters rooms long sealed by lies.
The fallen crown becomes a plow,
the exposed fraud a chance at flesh,
the humbled actor a student again.
So let the masquerade end.
Let tin confess it is tin.
For the future belongs not to faces that shine,
but to hearts that burn quietly,
and to truth, ancient as dust,
new as dawn,
standing still when all the masks fall.
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