The Man in the Box

The Man in the Box
Snickering, he sat seamlessly placing alluring beams.
The architect sprawled out, finished and dangling a key.
Pride etched in expression, as he imprisoned his first fiend.

A man, rather a prison of bones shrouded in dismay.
Not the calamity of a stiff jab,
But of his own scurvy reflection cast his way.
He was captive in a glass castle the architect had constructed.
Insecurities and his shameful diegesis pasted along the walls,
to remind he was still a culprit after all.

The builder pranced through luscious green, with a grin.
For he had captured a man of sin.
The man in the box unseen, with a smile.
For that architect would soon keel in a pain he hadn’t felt in a while.
Two simultaneous chuckles both exhibiting no remorse.
As they sat, waiting for two very different story lines to take course.

So, the builder held a wry laugh in a satisfaction so fleeting.
Until agonizing pain was his greeting.
Thrashing in guilt he lay, once exuberant in the man’s life he took away.
Everything around the builder begun to fade,
The only memory left, his palpable pain.
Though he was overwhelmed with relief.
Even as he awoke to shards of glass lodged in his veins.
Awoke to his blood clotting to paste,
To his knuckles white grasping the edges of a rock.
Petrified yet relieved in the realization he was the man in the box.