The Sinew Man

an original poem

Perhaps little is known of the Sinew Man. 

Those who do not know Him are simply not looking in the right places. 

If you squint into the mirror a bit, let the shards fall away, He’ll be there, hanging from the cheeks of a black-water void.

You may be taken aback.

For a good reason, of course. He is the flailing sinew of tertiary fiber and twine in some strange copulation, pulled like a mask over the throne of his eye sockets. Their vacant rims mutter and roll like circus balls, “Where is our heir? Where is our heir?”

The expanse of his upper jaw and the dislocated cranium topple with arteries like fingery roots on a rotting corpse, I am a rotting corpse. As he opens his mouth, his head tips back, blood swivels in disorganized organization like tunnels as if to beg for words. An organ. The fissure of intestines, even if ends up wrapped around the spine that does not want Him. 

He wants to ask if we are all becoming softer inside.

He is naked. He has no skin, no muscle, but useless sinew and useless, cold bones with nothing to warm themselves and useless veins pumping blood to no location but to coil endlessly in the vast library of the unknown, picking up random tomes, waiting to be chosen, waiting to be worn. 

Bread crumbs of words from my mother and her mother before that explain that He was once a thing so full of skin and phosphorus and nitrogen that it cramped up against the clay of his heart, but uncooked eggs of proverbs from my father and his father before that explain that it was the Great Poet that undid Him, commanding before Him like a death sentence and resurrection all at once, “Any who shall see the face of the Great Poet shall die!”

And he was stripped, the green leaving his body like unread letters and forgotten parables and discarded vocabulary; all the syllables and unions of tongue to teeth that humanity will never make fills his body like an empty coffin. But what use is a coffin if it is devoid of a body?

I see Him now, the epitome of Loneliness, a body empty of soul left with tendons like colonies of maggots and bones, clusters of white mold. 

He whispers again and again, pulling loose the tendons he worked so hard to tighten, “What are you made of?”

And when you talk to him, try not to look at his blank sockets, still murmuring and asking each other if they will ever have an 

Heir.