I observe the ancient wonder
An old music box,
Whose shell is enclosed in aged mahogany.

The innards contain dissimilar gears and cogs
***** by rust laid out by Father Time,
In his endless cycle.

The scarred ballerina
Her painted flesh corroding to a dust.
I witness the aging ballerina
In her endless German Waltz.

Yet the music, still pure,
As if the music fixes this artifact
As if it was her.

It's hard to talk to artists, see,
They've never made much sense
Their memories seem clouded
But yet I found one on a bench.
I didn't find the artist, no,
I only found his work
A broken, torn apart journal
A tattered, beat up book.
I opened to the first page
And saw a true sight to behold
Colors flew across the paper
In reds and blues and golds.  
The pencils must have danced
And the thoughts should have exploded
But what I had there in my hands
Was worth much more than noted.
I held his imagination
Every fiber of his thoughts
Every piece of information
That he ever had been taught.
The lines and circles spoke
Every word that he could not
They all told him not too
So he kept it under lock.
But there those drawings held the key
The secrets to his past
His present, future, all his hopes
'I wonder if they'd ask.'
He kept his secrets quiet
All his goals and all his dreams
I found his only outlet
His saving grace, it seems.
I looked through all the drawings
Some teasing, jokes, and grades
All expressed in colors
His feelings to create.
I never met this man that day
I still don't know him now
I wonder if he's happy
Or does he revel in the clouds?
See, artists are a piece of work
They're masters of the trade
Their specialty is feelings
Like the ones put on a page.

Eggs, eggs, toss them high in the air
Catch em, and gargle, and mash them, and swear
Eat them with shells, eat them with sauce
Eat them with bags, eat them with moss

Eggs, eggs, between sandwich bread
That's what the wise elderly miller had said
Before came the bomb and he had dropped dead
Before being poisoned by a surplus of lead

And then came a centipede, long and sanguine
And bit a small child, so recently weaned
Off the protein derived from his mother's fine eggs
So he had to start munching on his mother's fine legs

"Be warned" said the Miller, his hair all askew
While dousing his wounds with mountains of glue
A tapeworm emerged, and looked toward the sky
Feeling envy toward all the birds that could fly

But the Miller was quicker, even in old age
He smacked the worm soundly, in a manner enraged
Bruised from the damage, and covered in glue
The worm turned away from the sky that was blue

Never with pelicans would he fly with delight
Never with owls would he soar through the night
For all Darwin's cruelty, an injustice rings
Tapeworms simply have no need for wings

So he bit the old Miller, and laid ten thousand eggs
They hatched and devoured his liver and legs
And as the man writhed, waiting to die
He vomited upward, up toward the sky

The tapeworm went flying, up toward the clouds
The air felt exhilarating, the rushing wind loud
For once in his life, he soared with the birds
Then in came a swallow, and bit off a third

His body, segmented, fell in parts to the ground
Tears seeped from his eyes, his face in a frown
From the ground he gazed up into the ominous fog
Before being lapped up by an unlucky dog

The End