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