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