This is a poem Ligotti published in the original 2006 edition of Teatro Grottesco, published by David Tibet‘s Durtro Press, which is now defunct. It does not appear in in the 2008/2010 edition of the same collection by Virgin Books, nor does it appear in his Death Poems (Bad Moon Press, 2013).
“Envoi”
Nothing is for all
in this colony of puppets –
unvisioned in their variety
are the molded shapes,
the many-fashioned
players who do not speak
but only clack their jaws
whenever their faces meet,
saying nothing because
there is nothing to say.
And such a tangle of strings,
with some swaying loose –
pulling just slightly
on the figures in play,
those who have not vanished
from the buckling boards
of a tilted stage –
and some so taut
they incessantly rattle
the heads of all,
as if with vicious design. . . .
To rattle them so cruelly
through every angle,
as if there could be
cruelty in a string
hanging in a blackness
that encloses completely
the little world
of the puppet colony,
where nothing is for all
and all is for nothing.
