poem about a marionette

poem about a marionette

By Parker S. Taylor

I sit in my cramped study room before me books stacked high,

As amidst a mist of creeping gloom, my trouble’s all together whirled

When I hear the church bell’s pangs; thirteen clarion chimes call nigh—

Among the ceaseless clanks and bangs—headlong silence in my world.

But now I see my studies are in a language I can’t speak!

And in the room the clocks which mar my sad eyes like stigmata,

Show five digits I can’t read—and I suddenly feel weak

As the sun and moon, outside, I heed, are dancing in toccata.

I see the whole world through a pane of tinted glass,

With all my worries whirled into the most dizzying of shows.

As I watch the grand theatre of my life. Like glinting brass,

The grand, harmonic feature—the main attraction—overblows:

Now from the back, I see the part I thought was mine to play

Has gone instead, with a false heart, to an actor who’s not me at all;

The marionette there on the stage pretends all through the day

To think and feel and laugh and rage; such confidence and gall...

It cannot think, or speak, or see, yet everyone is fooled—

The marionette, performing Me, is a wonder in itself.

When otherwise—a normal day—it’s so precisely tooled

Fooling even me, somehow; that I think it is myself.