The Maker of Shadows

a poem by Roger B. Rueda

He wanted to be the best—
not just the best, but the only one.
He measured himself in ink,
black pools drying on white sheets,
each line a ladder rung,
each paragraph a wall built high
enough to block the sun of others.

He carried a pen like a sword,
but not the kind that defended truth.
His was the blade of revision,
a scalpel to carve
at the spine of reputations,
to excise the brilliance of better men,
leaving them pale, disjointed, forgotten.

He whispered half-truths
as though they were scripture,
recited them in dim-lit rooms
where voices curled like smoke,
where a single suggestion,
a raised brow,
could splinter admiration into doubt.

When he met greatness,
he did not kneel,
nor did he marvel.
He studied it like a blueprint,
found its load-bearing beams,
calculated its weakest joints,
and drove his words like nails
into the structure
until it swayed.

The real talent,
the real skill,
the real genius—
he saw it as a war.
And so, he did what war required:
he turned admiration into suspicion,
brilliance into arrogance,
virtue into hypocrisy.

He built his legend not on merit,
but on the bones of those
who might have stood beside him.
Their voices dimmed,
their names reduced to echoes,
while his own grew tall in their silence.

And oh, how he climbed.
Higher,
higher,
higher—
until the air thinned,
until the city below
became a blur of rooftops,
until there was no one left
to rival him,
no one left
to call him by his real name.

At the summit,
he stood in his own shadow,
the applause long since faded,
his fingers ink-stained and empty.

And then—
the silence.
Thick, waiting,
a question turned on its edge.

God sees.

Not the printed words,
but the ones unsaid.
Not the hands shaken,
but the hands pushed away.
Not the victories,
but the ruin they were built upon.

And now, in the hush
of his own making,
the question presses in,
thin as breath,
soft as the turning of a page:

Is this happiness?
Is this the life he fought for?

Or had he only written himself
into a kingdom of paper,
a fortress of dust,
where every line,
every word,
every conquest—
was nothing more
than the story of a man
who had slain his competition,
only to find he had murdered
his own soul in the process?