my father is a child, my mother's fourth

and yet as he leans over, 

in his scalp, the roots of his hair, 

his balding patch has thinned his king's crown

my mother's face has begun to look less like her own

she resembles her mother,

as i resemble mine. i stare at all three

and time stares back through the walls of a lived-in home,

eating away

our home is dirty,

its floors dirtier, holding the intermingled parts of ourselves in its crevices

i endure the layers of dirt stuck to the bottom of my feet

dead skin and shed hair, a creation of the time having gotten to know ourselves only through impressions of each other's husks,

is it of decomposition or a metamorphosis?

a creation,

how much of its dirt is of a mother's and father's?

there is someone waiting inside of the crevices 

of me,

their name kept neat underneath my tongue,

their dead skin and hair obscured and entrapped,

underneath my fingernails

with scratch marks gone through layers of dirt,

a creation

for whom neither a mother or father will have the pleasure of time given

so when my husk leans back to slip away, through the dirt, into the crevices of our floors

when rigor has not yet set in,

will they have known whether it was decomposition or metamorphosis i had succumbed to?

will they see time staring back, still, through the floors of a lived-in home,

eating away?