Involuntary Doppelganger

Dead lives rive

From my human hide

When the cult had come for me

I could have got away, but didn't

I couldn't be the one to cause this any longer

Had it been a day or a year inside this skin?

I could not tell, the faces I had captured over centuries took hold

I became a kind of hunter

Eating pelts of pleading meat to acquire their appearance

Taking their form with will alone

Alive and crawling out of me

To catch it's prey

Shed you foreign poison peltry

Take the rind you want

Seen to be a wicked omen

Despite attempts to hide my live birth mark

Crown of a dark demon tar

I'd taken back with me from the other side

There is no God

For if there was

Then how'd this evil take me?

It seeped and crawled it's way along my face

As mother wept

Stealing identities from every skin it sees

Growing with urgency

When he tried to cut it off

Many a time (to no avail)

It would take my livid father's manic features

Laughing at him as he tried to hack them off his son

Knowing that he could not end my life

He took his own

Mother mourned the death of him

And knew that many more would follow

If I didn't leave right then

Heading out into the woods

I promised I would never come back

I thank the dead

That she knows not what I have become

Taking over adolescent tendencies

To feed

To hunt

To kill

To change

Decades take me deep into the curses endless undertow

There is no time or end behind this epidermal prison

My thread of youth imprisoned

Tortured by immortal victims

I am the Involuntary Doppelgänger

I can not stop it, my skin is alive

All of the time I've spent inside it

I never thought it could be calling out to any other

Involuntary Doppelgänger

Had it grown bored of it's feed?

Or gained knowledge with time?

Whatever the change had been

I felt it emanating information

Had it tried to send a beacon

Warning them to stay away?

I heard the voices calling back

Involuntary Doppelgänger

Had it tried to send a beacon

Warning them to stay away?

I heard the voices calling back

Involuntary Doppelgänger

One last face it had to acquire

Before it's caught

The menace cloak found her

Still alive and skinning bodies of her own

It appeared she had done the same as I

For all this time, to see her son again

And there I stood

The cloak of others made her impossible to recognize

She carved me like any other martyr of our curse

When the cult had breached our cabin

Taking me to be a random victim of the doppelgänger

Heading out into the woods

I promised I would never come back

I thank the dead that she knows not what I have become

Taking over adolescent tendencies

To feed

To hunt

To kill

To change

Decades take me deep into the curses endless undertow

My tongue speaks in a cadence that only A.U.M. can decipher

Void of bidding heading out a very inner wreathing

Of a demon with intent to animate and be gone