prettyoddasnineintheafternoon:

Monster

“Okay, so I’m the dragon. Big deal. You still get to be the hero.” -Richard Siken

I.

You say you’re ‘difficult.’ You say your tattoos are like little chipped-off pieces from something larger lurking within the fractured cave walls of your personality. 

You say people peruse the index of your heart and leave you feeling sorry that they ever crack open its spine in the first place.

Why do you let them treat you like a monster? I never write it, but oh, if only you knew how I let it circle my head the way spirals of blood stain the first snow of the year.

II.

Do you dream of tearing down buildings and dousing this world in flames until it sparkles like a Topaz?

Do you think the things with teeth and scales are more beautiful than the people trying to shoot at them?

Do you see how the creature called ‘hideous’ is simply lost in our world, unaware of how it works, and so we vilify him even though he’s not inherently evil?

(And in his naivety he will immediately be perceived as a threat, in his naivety he doesn’t know where he searches for meaning, other people are only searching for excuses, afraid of a thing they don’t understand.)

Do you see the sorrow of the unknown?

Do you feel the snapped-string solitude of something no one is willing to befriend?

Do you know your reflection grew odd and strange as the noise in your head refused to change?

Do you know the glitches of your brain and the gloom of your inconsistency stem from the grim reality that you’re brilliant and broken and utterly damned as all divine things are?

Do you see the way we call it a ‘murder of crows’ or a ‘flamboyance of flamingos’ and think we should also call it ‘an innocence of monsters?’”

(If so check, Yes. If you check more than one, you’re a ‘freak.’ If you check more than three you’re a ‘lunatic.’ If you check all of them and mentally add another twenty-six questions to the list before even reading this part, then don’t be alarmed, you’re just a boy named ‘Newton Geiszler.’)

III.

But what about the boy who wasn’t destined to become anything? What about the boy was meant to be nothing?

If you see ‘hero,’ you need to strengthen your prescription. If you see ‘hero’ you need to remember the mousy cripple who writes back and surrounds himself in a kingdom filled with numbers becauseThis world and its people just won’t do. If you see ‘hero’ you might also need to see a psychiatrist (and straighten out your priorities.)

How it must hurt (for me, of all people) to be the one to break the news to you that ‘Heroes are not in our domain nor our archetype (and quite possibly not even our blood-type’) but we still have a sort of sweet resonance, don’t we? 

Sure, I guess. 

Sweet until the building crumbles on our bodies and you whisper We made it. Well, almost, as the debris tears us to shreds, a strained laugh still on your face as your liver bleeds out next to my severed arm.  Sweet until you remember black-and-white turned technicolor only lasts so long before the television set spontaneously combusts. Sweet until you remember the woman who follows King Kong up to the top of the Empire State Building. Sweet until you remember the nostalgic magnetism of a love that made you think the both of them would be alright. 

Sweet until you remember the dangling allure of romance is a pendulum swung right over the precipice of tragedy (but forget it right up until we’re already plunging to the ground below.)

IV.

Here’s the one about the prince who grew scales across the sea (but didn’t rise from its depths, only wished he did) who tossed and turned in his sleep and became jagged in places he didn’t understand. Who spent so much time in a laboratory he felt he was better suited for one than life outside of it. 

Here’s his transformation in which howls were visceral and salt-tear-trepidation-turned-toxic-only poisoned him, but no one else, so he let it. He let it for fear of what he knew he already was. He let it and he watched his own dissection; there was the stomach-bile-lonliness plunged like fangs into his own neck. There was the scalpel and syringe and chemical defect. There was the eternal want of Understanding and Attention to break a spell but all that was shown in return were the chain-shackled-dungeon-doors-remedy of Abuse and Neglect.

Here’s the one about the glassy-eyed space cadet who’d give up every dream of shining nebulas just to see the prince’s smile, unweighted- free from the dread of prior litanies-free from What did I do wrong this time, how can I say I’m sorry for breaking something again? Free from If it will make you want-then how do I destroy the parts you choose in a self-induced wreck-

Free from If it will make it easier to love me, then how do I become less?

V.

Dearest, how do I rewrite fairytales when I don’t believe in anything?

Dearest, how can I enchant when I am also a thing that’s been cursed?

Dearest, how much must I barter for you to see There are no villains in a world that already condemns us by simply allowing us to still wake up every morning even when there’s nothing left to live for?

(and by extension, it’s a paradox; there are no heroes.

 It’s an opposite and equal reaction.

There cannot be.  

We’re all various shades of Jekyll and Hyde, Werewolf and Witch, Wendigo and Kaiju. 

We are all collectively credited at the end of this film spanning seven continents and countless epochs as The Monster.)

VI.

You don’t reply. So I start out the only way I know how:

If I’m the hero, then this is a terribly poor excuse of a rescue. 

(For others have gotten close and shriek at the sharpness of your teeth…)

If I’m the damsel, then tell me how to fall back into you.

(…but all I ask is to run my fingers along their ridges and see what lies beneath…)

If you’re the dragon, then I skewed our story and stole it from the stars. 

(…but all I ask is to inhale the tendrils of your smoke-stained exhales and cling to you in sleep.)

If you’re the dragon, then here’s the breath that can bend metal bars;

I care for you just as you are.

–Poems Hermann Gottlieb wrote to a boy across the sea and never sent.