The Clockwork Orphan’s Lament

Beneath the moon’s cataract, milky and thin,
He traces the scars where the river once ran—
Now a vein of cracked glass, a fossilized stream,
Its murmurs entombed in the vaults of a dream.

The orphan’s sole treasure: a locket of lead,
Its face etched with symbols the centuries read.
A portrait inside, half-erased by the years—
Two eyes like dim stars in a fog-buried sphere.

“Who carved you?” he asks the cold metal at dusk,
As towers collapse into violet husk.
The wind, his sole answer, intones through the voids,
A hymn for the lost and the clocks never buoyed.

One midnight, he follows the north star’s decline
To a cathedral of gears, where dead pendulums pine.
Its doors, iron ribs, groan a welcome half-heard,
And there, in the nave, sleeps a clock without word.

Twelve numerals, bleached, circle vacant expanse,
Its hands petrified in a fractured trance.
Yet deep in its chamber, a faint ticking stirs—
The orphan leans close, and the machinery whirrs.

A voice from the rafters, a sigh wrapped in gauze:
“Child of the ruins, you’ve breached time’s last laws.
What truth would you wrest from the jaws of the night?
Each question devours what fragile light might.”

The boy meets the specter—a man made of chains,
His beard silver cobwebs, his breath winter’s strains.
“I seek,” says the orphan, “the face in this frame.
The hands that once held me. The hearth I can’t name.”

The guardian points to the clock’s hollow core,
Where cogs eat their tails and sand spills no more.
“Wind me,” he croaks, “and ascend the brass stair.
But memory’s tax is the weight you must bear.”

Three turns of the key, and the cathedral awakes—
Gears shriek into fire, the floor quakes and breaks.
The orphan ascends spiral steps, each one a year,
While centuries bleed into his veins like a sear.

At the zenith, a chamber—a womb of old light—
Holds mirrors that spin, slow and terrible, bright.
In each, a vignette of a life left behind:
A woman who sings to the storm’s mournful whine.

Her hands cradle air where an infant once wept,
Her lips shape a name the mirrors have kept.
The orphan, struck dumb, presses palm to the glass—
The image dissolves into mercury mass.

“Mother!” he cries to the consuming sheen,
But the mirrors close ranks, form a labyrinthine screen.
Her voice, now a chorus, swells through the room:
“My child, you’ve outlived me. I’m ash in the tomb.”

He flees downward, harried by tickings grown loud,
His body now older, his posture less proud.
The stairs crumble fast as youth’s hourglass drains—
He stumbles, now silvered with age’s harsh stains.

The guardian waits, but his chains have all snapped.
“Fool,” mourns the phantom, “you’ve sprung time’s last trap.
The clock, once rewound, cannot pause your decay.
The truth you desired is the price you must pay.”

The orphan collapses, his locket now bare—
The portrait’s last fleck lost to indifferent air.
His fingers, now skeletal, clutch at the void,
While the cathedral implodes, all its glory destroyed.

Dawn finds the city still choked in its shroud,
No trace of the boy or the clock’s parting crowd.
Just a lone locket, half-melted and charred,
Where a new face appears—a youth, broken, scarred.

The winds lift the ash into spirals unseen,
A dance of the lost in the realm between.
And far off, a ticking still hums in the bones
Of the earth—faint, eternal, a dirge of dead tones.

Years later, a girl with a locket of lead
Stares into eyes like dim stars, nearly dead.
She asks the gray air, “Who carved you?” and sighs,
As the ruins, in silence, continue to rise.