The moonlight glided down and fell upon the neighborhood,
Shedding itself onto the downtrodden place
out of pity

The glow wedged itself into the dark corners that no one cared for,
Until it cast itself onto
the entire city

The light fell through the cracked windows of the old mansions,
Places once gilded in gold
and lined with war

But now all that was left was the playthings of the children,
Whose fathers counted their money
with hands covered in gore

The dust settled onto the dolls,
Their long-lashed eyes opened wide
but seeing naught

Until they rose from the terrain,
Their porcelain limbs cold
and their faces gaunt

With closed eyes
They danced around the decaying chamber
Swirling dust around them as they awoke

One by one,
They rose and cavorted in the indigo moonlight
Until one of them broke

She hit the ground with a sickening crash,
Tears streaking downward
Her now shattered face

The assembly stood in silence as she struggled to rise,
Fractured porcelain tumbling
onto her garb of pallid lace

She finally stood and brushed off her dress,
And began pirouetting with the others
feigning a smile of compassion

While being observed by a doll as fractured as she was wise,
Sitting alongside a doll as young
as she was ashen

“You must’ve made an awful lot of mistakes to look like that”
The infantile one said
to her fragmented neighbor

The elder simply smiled at her and recited a phrase as old as time
“But it is our way to make mistakes,
To fissure until we are nothing but vapor”

“For when we shatter it means that our time on this earth is done,
And we will pass on our legacy to the young and
blissfully ignorant generation ”

The young one laughed and tugged on the doll’s fissured hand
“Can we dance with them?” She asked as she tried to pull her senior
from her location

The pallid child whimpered as she looked at the aged doll before her
“I want to go!” she said as she began backing away
'til she tumbled off the shelf

The dawn came swiftly as the dolls stared in shock at the child’s shattered remains
They slackened and their eyes became blank as
the sun revealed herself

The dust eventually settled,
The shattered china remained strewn across the floor
The dolls eyes remained empty
But the stench of death endured