For far too long he had been
a marionette dancing to a tune
he could not hear, always staying silent,
lost in a kabuki theater of the absurd.
But he had grown tired of performing
at their every demand, his life lived
perpetually on call, no time truly his.
He was drained by them, empty,
not that they cared for they knew
the adulation of the audience was theirs,
certainly not for their mere living puppet.
He finally cut the strings, collapsed
a robot whose programming had been
shut down with no possibility of a reboot,
so they cast him aside, no longer useful
another tool worn out, discarded.
and they set out to move on with others
in the role that had long been his.
But in that final moment of his he knew
he was finally alive, he knew a freedom
that he had never thought possible,
a freedom his old masters never knew,
for they were bound for the next show
and the next after that, never stopping.
When the audiences grew ever more thin,
when the applause waned like the decay
of the peal of a tired bell, they
were lost, now condemned to inhabit
an empty stage, while he sat smiling
yet silent as an audience of one.

First published in Flora Fiction, A Literary Magazine, Vol. 5, Issue
https://florafiction.com/literary-magazine/