Effigy

The light is starting to show through the cracks

on that frail, self-made effigy.

Stitched together with heartache and poetry

its days were surely numbered,

those wasted words spilling out like guts

you never knew existed before.

The clock tick-tocks and the puppet slips like sand

from my clumsy fingers

at a rate unmatched by any pen or voodoo.

It’s not the absence that hurts

but the grind of grit left in the pathways on my palms.