By day he wore a face of stone,
a man at work, a man at home.
Mid-tier, mid-forties, fading fast,
a shadow built to never last.
Unseen, unseen, the hours crawled,
his name half-heard, his voice forestalled.
Reliable. Invisible.
Forgettable. Admissible.
But night —
night gave him another skin,
a grinning mask, a skeleton grin.
Blurry selfies, pumpkin puns,
cheap delights for midnight ones.
And they laughed.
They saw.
He mattered more
than the man he’d left behind the door.
She answered louder than the rest,
late-twenties, lonely, dispossessed.
Her laughter quick, replies too fast,
his irony returned as gospel, cast.
“I know this isn’t you,” she said.
“I want the man who hides instead.”
He recoiled.
Deleted.
Ghosted.
Fled.
But silence is a mask that turns,
and absence is a fire that burns.
3:33, the phone alight,
a skeleton meme each waiting night.
3:33, a plastic hand,
a note enclosed: You’ll understand.
3:33, the offering grows —
a pumpkin smashed, its seeds exposed.
Her love became a ritual rhyme,
his jokes became a curse in time.
“You don’t get to leave,” she swore,
“You owe me you, forevermore.”
And he —
the man who sought the crowd,
who wanted laughter, not too loud,
who craved the gaze but feared the weight,
found every mask could seal his fate.
No one is innocent here, no one.
Not the trickster, not the one undone.
He wore deception like a shield,
she made obsession her battlefield.
Now only one mask still remains —
cheap plastic grin through windowpanes.
Spoopy, childish, still, absurd,
yet sharper than his final word.
The curtains gap, the silence bends,
a tilted grin that never ends.
And he knows, beneath the grin so slight:
her mask will never leave the night.