🔞Of Jekyll and the Hyde

In the garret's choking gloom, a zealot's prayer, Jekyll distilled his heaven from despair. To mend the fracture, elevate the meek, With chemistry that made the rafters creak. Below, his Elise, in linen white and trust, Unmarked by vapors souring into lust. The flask births shadows, viscous, amniotic, A science pregnant with the purely psychotic. No god to bless, no cross to bear the mark, He gulps the dark to murder his own spark. Behold the schism: Jekyll and the Hyde. The saint eviscerated from inside. Witness the hollow where a conscience grew, A feral logic, beautiful and untrue. A shudder starts, a cellular disgrace, The noble features twist and interlace. The spine contorts, a crack of breaking bone, A guttural sigh that chills to stone. The skin grows coarse, the knuckles sprout to claws, A intellect undone by feral laws. Where reason reigned, now rawest hunger burns, And for the love he cherished, now he yearns. It knows her scent—like milk and summer air— And pounds the door, encountering her there. It hears her heartbeat through the ancient grain, And crafts a voice of Jekyll, mild and plain. Then, footsteps on the stair, a timid knock, A worried voice to pierce the midnight clock. He scrapes the wood, and whispers, honey-sweet, “My key is lost, my love, I entreat…” The key's dull turn, the universe's pause, Then violation of all natural laws. What happened in that room, the dark defiled, Was known to none… except for Dr. Jekyll and the Hyde. He woke to copper stench and aching cold, To a narrative in crimson, bravely told. Not murder—that implies a fleeting strife— But sculpture from the substance of his life. His howl was not his own; Hyde laughed within, A parasite beneath the thinning skin. He felt him scratch and paw the soul's last door, A tenant claiming freehold evermore. No battle left. A cohabitation, still. Hyde drinks his tears upon the windowsill. The potion's spent. The cage door swung too wide. Now Jekyll is the thing he keeps inside.