The Monster Poem Cycle: #4: "Identity"
May. 25th, 2012 12:12 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
capri0mniOne thing I learned in high school math (besides the fact that I prefer learning math outside of school), was that it takes plotting three points before you can be certain of your line. It wasn't until I finished up the third poem that I recognized the connections I'd already made between them, in the form of recurring motifs. This one starts off at the point almost at the end of the last one, right before the closing couplet ("So our identities, are fragile, caught/Between what's in our dreams and what's been filed."); I wanted to be clear that I meant the complex, shadowy dreams of our subconscious, and not the saccharine substitute for "fondest wish," So that's where I began.
THE MONSTER'S CHALLENGE OF IDENTITY
Just as a rowboat scrapes the pebbled beach
I drift back from my sleep to feel the bed.
Receding like the tide, just out of reach,
A dream slips, half-remembered, from my head.
The nightly riddle posed, always the same:
It asks me who I am, beyond my name.
The question's asked again out in the crowd
Reflected in a stranger's troubled glance,
As though I were an insult spat out loud:
A portent for the fickle whims of Chance.
Philosophers in centuries long past
Wrote cunningly and well of God's good plan:
Which creatures were the first, and which the last,
The proper rank and order meant for Man.
And creatures (like myself) who can't belong?
{We were the curly brackets of their set}
To demonstrate, by living, Right from Wrong,
So all remember God, and not forget:
A belief that's set in stone, or so it seems...
Although it cracks, a little, in my dreams.
[Edit: I bet the middle quatrain of the main part seems like a non sequitor to anyone outside my brain, huh? Let me try a fix -- How about:
Philosophers of centuries long past
Wrote cunning answers all about God's plan:
Which creatures were the First, and which the Last,
The proper rank and order meant for Man.
Better?]
THE MONSTER'S CHALLENGE OF IDENTITY
Just as a rowboat scrapes the pebbled beach
I drift back from my sleep to feel the bed.
Receding like the tide, just out of reach,
A dream slips, half-remembered, from my head.
The nightly riddle posed, always the same:
It asks me who I am, beyond my name.
The question's asked again out in the crowd
Reflected in a stranger's troubled glance,
As though I were an insult spat out loud:
A portent for the fickle whims of Chance.
Philosophers in centuries long past
Wrote cunningly and well of God's good plan:
Which creatures were the first, and which the last,
The proper rank and order meant for Man.
And creatures (like myself) who can't belong?
{We were the curly brackets of their set}
To demonstrate, by living, Right from Wrong,
So all remember God, and not forget:
A belief that's set in stone, or so it seems...
Although it cracks, a little, in my dreams.
[Edit: I bet the middle quatrain of the main part seems like a non sequitor to anyone outside my brain, huh? Let me try a fix -- How about:
Philosophers of centuries long past
Wrote cunning answers all about God's plan:
Which creatures were the First, and which the Last,
The proper rank and order meant for Man.
Better?]
no subject
Date: 2012-05-25 04:10 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-05-25 06:12 pm (UTC)... or just shy.
And thank you, BTW.
That "Reflected" line is inspired, in part, by one of my favorite Irish proverbs: "The eye of a friend is a good* mirror." A friend will tell you if you have spinach in your teeth, or your buttons are crooked... but won't care a whit if you look old, or "fat."
The shadow side of that, of course, is the judgments of strangers and/or bureaucrats who have power over us.
*as in "honest."