Verse, Blank, Like Your Face

Verse, Blank, Like Your Face

How I loathe your face,
always there in front of me,
always the same,
expressionless,
so symmetrical,
perfectly detailed,
clean.
I look at it,
even when I don’t want to.

I watch you at work.
There’s no life in what you do.
Your hands are skeletal,
black,
like the garments of Death.
It’s him you really serve,
not your Father,
whose name, if spoken here
would infect my poem with rhyme.
Your movements are so methodical.
I feel them taking my life,
ticking it off bit by bit,
one minute measure at a time.

Don’t you see that all you really do
is make everyone feel insufficient,
like no matter how hard we try,
we’ll never measure up,
get it all done,
be good enough.
I can’t count the times I’ve dreamed
of what I could achieve,
if I could ever
get free from you.

When you talk to me,
your words never change.
I think you say them to mock,
and try to infect my poem again
with your own name.
When I die you won’t notice.
You’ll drone on and on as always.
But the last word is mine, not yours.
You have no soul,
and mine is eternal.