Puppet Pantomime

I conduct my seance of sawdust and spine Cadaverous craftsman, Architect of design You, with your dance of tendon and breath Shall learn how the living outlives themselves A ribcage rewired with pendulum heft Eyes swapped for orbs of amber and theft No dirge for the flesh, no psalm for the grave Your pulse, now my slave well-behaved I suture your sinew to Gossamer Gears A palimpsest puppet, erased of your years You pulsed with chaos, veins like rogue vines I'll prune you to perfection, dear marionette of mine Your heartbeat's a nuisance, your gasp's out of time Let's trade your flesh for a symphony of twine The skeptics? The kneel as my mannequin now Their protests embalmed in porcelain vows A tongue becomes tassel, a whimper - a wind A soul merely varnished, stripped and rescind I draft your demise in inks laced with frost Our limbs a ledger of humanity lost Your voice, once a wildfire, lost into chimes Music box requiem, gnawing at time The pulpits and podiums confess My puppet preach in your Sunday's best They croon of salvation through keyhole-lipped grin While choirs of Cherubs squirms within The wars you once waged, a pantomime Soldiers of cork with bayonets of bough Your history's scripted, your future's erased In my image retraced Your children weaves daisies through doll god hair Their laughter rewired to hymns of despair Your lovers, my puppets, draped in your sheets Their porcelain passion, a farce none defeats You'll toil in factories stitching my breed Your hands grafter tight to the looms that you feed Your dreams? Just blueprints Your prayers? Spooled thread Your God? A mute puppet with my face for a head The poets now scribe in ciphers of cogs The scholars dissects their own hollowed-out hearts The midwives delivers stillborns of tin Swaddled in velvet with keys in their skin A rebel once spat at my ceramic feet Swore he'd unstitch his empire of meat I let him conspire, let his pamphlet take root Now he's a scarecrow, stuffed with his own pursuit They say I've grown frail, that my scissors rust slow That my theater of conquest has nowhere to go But fools, can't you see? Your the relic, the stain My dolls births new ones in a cycle sans chain Society's my workshop, your fate's but a draft A wind-up Valhalla, unbound by your craft So sleep little sapiens, under my cure Your empire's a vignette, my strings are pure