The Lying Man and the Clock
I should really be writing my essay (due tomorrow!) but I can't have this poem stand here
under my name without some well due editing. I would remove it but I feel like I have not
given the idea a fair amount of my effort.
Let me tell you the story of the man who wared with time
Let me tell you of the lying man who thought himself free from fate's monotonous rhyme:
This lying man would not a true story tell
To the masses: tales of himself in a regal crown he would sell
And they would ask: How come you here, great king?
And he would weave tales of abandoning his office for a woman's ring
Some would jeer and others cheer
But always he would smile ear to ear
At time in its grandeur he would leer
To priests he would lament of his heinous crimes, to never repeat them he swore
Begging their pity and reveling in the new skin he wore
So why, you may ask, does the liar lie of heinous acts
When he could lie of owning the grandest tracts?
And the snake of snakes would slither its tongue
And shed its skin, a coat in its closet so neatly hung
It would tell you a million tales, not one of them true
And never itself shed in any hue
For the flesh beneath may be soft and fickle
But the skin above is always rough and brittle
The flesh beneath once shed, would still the beating of his heart
The skin above once shed, would instill in his life immortality, the one true art
And always the happiest man alive he would be
Living the lives of any man his mind could see
And so the lying man would not a true story tell
The lying man would lie till the day he fell
That day the king of kings dies
The day the criminal meets his demise
While the lying man that was lives on in every story
As friends and foe would debate the king's glory
All the while the lying man that is sinks deeper into his grave
And that priest would remember a criminal who only mercy did he crave
And that coat of skins would weaken and tumble
The skins within gone brittle and begun to crumble
As the lying man that was, flesh and vulnerability, decays
All those skins he left behind, time will one day erase.
And so lying man, you had smiled in the face of time,
Done no great dead but steal what was theirs and mine
You had fallen thinking you had bested the clock
When only you had deafened yourself to the echo of tick tock
© Samir Georges
2010
Copyright © Samir Georges | Year Posted 2010
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