Model of the Age (Poetry)

You are a canvas, patient under paint
a yearning for the sunrise haunts your form
a far off light illuminates, but faint
skimming, touching soft, and almost warm.

You are a template — digitally pure
no history to taint that fabled skin
perfect in your modernist allure
and nothing but a vacancy within.

You are the goddess risen from sleep’s vale
the image man creates as his ideal
a mythic face, but bloodless — cloned too pale
your fiction too precise to pass for real.

You wear your paint — sweet mask which so defines
that men go weak, while women try to trace
what they can of fashion’s changing lines —
so match the contours of perfection’s face.

You live a flawless concept on this page
ephemeral as beauty, empty, too
of character — the model of an age
where vanity contrives to copy you.

But youth is fleeting — such deceit will fail
and turn to dust, this forgery undone —
a scattered figment like a paper trail
along the path where time insists we run.

You feign enigma — soulless as a sphinx
distant with your eyelids closed and smoothed
and unconcerned with what the whole world thinks
you’re someone’s dream — but nothing can be proved.