April Poem-A-Day 23: The monster in retrospect

This is desperately in need of being edited down to half the size but I've been poking at it for days and I'm a bit sick of it. Too many cutesy alliterations litter it and they should be severely purged. And it loses focus in the last quarter, meandering to a weak end. This illustrates that you can make me write daily poems but you can't make me write well.


The monster in retrospect
Could not stand to fight.

This desire to club him
in the orchard rows
rises from fertile ashes,
the fragrant fruit
bearing sad witness,

There is no romanticizing
this vicious beast ravening:
he lusts for blood,
he brings only pain.
His only goal clear:
a feast of you.

Never let illusion
delude you, blur your
bounds of safe haven.
Never attempt to tame
a fulltime hunter:
he will devour you,
he will consume you whole.

Yet here be a mystery:
unbidden within you,
the dark primordial destroyer
throws off hibernating sleep,
discards the anesthetic cocoon.
Ancestral instinct, inchoate and strong,
bares red teeth, shoulders aside
the civil veneer and does not bide
with endless patience or vain hope.

Facing the monster calls forth
indwelling strands of strength:
forged from generations,
descended through warriors,
crafted by countless survivors.

This transformation,
so resolute, so complete, so awful,
confounds the monster:
prey should never resist,
never turn to face the pursuer,
never turn to act like a hunter.

Then he begins to feel fear
eating into him from the edges,
eating out from his chill grey heart,
melting his cocked confidence,
the vampyr in sunlight.

In that preternatural moment,
his abilities fail,
his power falls away,
his nightmare bounds free.
Chained by surprise,
drained of momentum,
a weak and quaking coward,
toothless and de-clawed.

Now mewling and puling,
the monster abject in defeat,
as if he deserved mercy,
as if he had ever granted mercy.

This is now so clear:
his cravenness was hidden,
his strength an illusion,
a thin façade, scrim sheer.

Now he will gutter,
shunned by stray dogs
repelled by his craven scent.

No longer a strong monster,
merely a pathetic poser
bereft of respect and alone,
surrounded by cannibals.

Monsters make good eating.

© 2009, php