My Masquerade party has started,
friends and family are here,
arbitrary with their masks.
.
The dancers blur into gold and wine.
I slip past the dining room and climb the staircase.
Her door is open, though she no longer lives here.
Something small glints on the dresser.
________________________________________________________________________________________
I am more than flesh and bone,
DNA whispers like a throne,
where I existed before
Black Dahlia's shadow was known.
.
She's my human mother's guise, haunted eyes,
a token of disgrace, no grace.
She is where waste defies,
what makes a human pantomime.
.
I pry my golden locket wide,
Mother's smile resides,
radiant masks where rot hides.
.
Her human disguise
is blonde hair and blue eyes,
Once she wore Southern Belle extensions
Cadaverous paleness frosts her soul's depression.
.
Her hyms to religious throngs
are turned away,
She is a mere shadow
of the woman the demons tweak
A wounded woman
who no longer squeaks.
.
She is a mere mime
that grits her teeth
through her human disguise.
.
A living mime, a shadowed play,
moving through the world in grisly sway.
.
The locket makes her smile shine,
There, the house that she called "mine,"
Now taken, forsaken, sold, and mistaken.
.
The locket hides the full decay
of haunted rooms where spirits lay.
She is just a bedridden girl
who lays in her filth.
.
She's just a lonely, bedridden girl
whose children are just petals she repels,
whose human disguise dances her lines
and plays the scene as her emotional mime.
.
Her disguse is sweet like wine
yet what's behind is bitter as lime,
sinister and cynical is her name
the master has tamed and maimed a dame,
.
The locket is forgetting her name!
Her human guise is a puppet torn,
it's forever worn;
a life reduced; now she's a mime the disguise, a pantomime ----
all she's known for in this lifetime.