Duende
By: C. W. Baker
The gigantic house
With more rooms than you can count
Stands alone. Like them.
There were three young children who lived in a house
With mommy and daddy happily espoused
But trouble brewed behind daddy’s eyes
He wanted to win and youth was the prize.
He left and he partied far into the night
While mommy said nothing and stayed out of sight
He raged and screamed against age and pain
Trying to grasp a lost past fame
He wanted it younger, prettier, new
First the car, then the house, and finally mommy too.
The tears were short lived as he raged in the night
For what he’d become was a terrible sight
He was smart as a whip but it was all lost
Among the petty and banal that his life was cost
He found with a start he couldn’t grow old
Just irrelevant and lost a superfluous troll
And the children they watched but couldn’t understand
Trying to find their lost father In the empty old man.
They vied for affection that he could never give
He loved only himself, for nothing else could he live.
He lived in glass towers that no one could reach
Never noticing that nothing was under his feet
Living on hot air, a veneer of celebrity
With parties, and booze and women a plenty.
To watch from the outside, to judge him so
Is as hypocritical as a raven chastising a crow
He could be happy, his life fulfilled.
But I hear his children beg, and see the tears they have spilled.
I stand as a foreigner who was never invited
To spy on his life, most intimate and private
I don’t speak, I just watch cradling their heads
As I tell them nice stories and put them to bed.
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