Pinocchio Is Old

The wood is too seasoned, the grain hoary. the moppet has grown insane, its wood now riddled with timeless lies. A cat in a dark corner will not look at it. Mice cower under its grim shadow. In a twilit kitchen an old man mumbles as he gums a boiled egg while deranged eyes peer through walls. Pinocchio is old, he has been set on a hook. fibrous sinews dangle from his notched frame. knotted veins grind together inside the oaken cage of his chest. Made to imitate and deceive he has become what we dare not look upon: a hollowness within a dead core. In the potbellied stove, logs pray with crackling flames hope to never become that thing that hangs and glares, a wood wormed ruination, its painted adolescence flaking now to a crackbrained fantoccini gone feral.