the dictator

He tasted the marrow of stolen dreams,

a crown forged in lies,

his laughter a fissure splitting the earth,

his hands, a plague across the stars.

But time is not his vassal.

The winds remember the whispers of the silenced,

the soil hums with their unmarked grief.

The seed of ruin he sowed in the dark

bore fruit in the light of another life.

Once a despot draped in silk,

now a beetle clinging to a cracked stone,

the weight of his deeds distilled

into the fragile curve of a shell.

Above, a shadow; indifferent, inevitable.

The heel rises,

gravity speaks,

and justice finds its form.