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.