Nothing Is In Vain Vanitas

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The skull lies as if caught mid-laughter — a perfect white grin rimmed with shadow. Between those immaculate teeth unfurls the tongue, long and damp, not stiff with death but supple, alive, as if it had refused the command to stop. It slithers outward like a root seeking soil, a red survivor of the body’s vanished empire.

The flies rest upon the dome — strong, dark, purposeful. They are not the fragile symbols of rot, but industrious scavengers pausing between feasts, their small black eyes reflecting the room’s humid light. They know the rhythm of return, how life insists even through the gate of bone.

Around the skull, a scatter of pearly everlastings — the flowers that once promised permanence. Once pale and bright, they are now browned at their edges, touched by a damp warmth that has undone their boast of eternity. A few nestle inside the eye sockets like blind sentinels, others fall across the crown, others lie strewn like forgotten offerings on the floor. Even the everlastings decay, their name mocked softly by time.

And beside this quiet theater rests a long branch of yohimbe, dark and fibrous, half-polished by human handling. The man, long ago, had turned to it in desperation, seeking to awaken what was fading within him. Now it lies beside him again, but it no longer promises virility — it only bears witness.

The flies rise and settle. The flowers sink inward, brittle to the touch. The tongue keeps crawling, slow and deliberate, like a thought unwilling to die.

This is no memento mori; it is a continuation.
Everything feeds everything else — tooth, tongue, fly, flower, bark.
Nothing here is vain, and nothing, not even death, has learned how to stop.