The Beauty Of The Monster Poem by grace mariner

Even the monsters face doesn't look so horrific in the light of day.
We fear the night.
The blackness and all that it contains can never create the fear that comes when the eye is tricked by lights clarity,
or illusion of it.
The magick comes and convinces us.
We have nothing to fear!
Look at this poor wounded creature who ambles and rambles among us.
The eye sees what it is allowed to see of the duplicity of the human condition.
Love and hate.
Pleasure and pain.
Good and evil.
In the cleansing light of that burning star the good shines forth,
like gold in the water.
And the monster is no longer scary.
On the contrary, he becomes quite appealing!
The guise is brilliant...
devoted son, father, husband, lover.
The most respected of his tribe.
The shaman, the mentor.
All seek his wisdom, his mercy, his love.
Like Christ he suffers for all of our transgressions and forgives,
with the sweetest words and the most elegant gestures.
We stand, awestruck, at his benevolence.
Never judge the book by its cover right?
We would never know the salty brininess of the oyster if we judged it by it's shell.
And our political correctness and our moral politeness is blinded, so overcome with love for the monster.
And so, we welcome him, forgetting certain ancient caveats...
never invite the vampire in...
never open your mind to the demons...
never take candy from strangers...
a leopard never changes his spots...
and always remember, once a monster, always a monster.
Lessons forgotten, always creeping back as that eternal orb is laid to rest.
Darkness descends and with it comes the trickster.
The shadows reveal the true nature of the beast.
The blackness illuminates clearly what the eye could not detect in the glow of the light that emanates from the brilliance of that guise.
Icy blue orbs, cool as water in the light now burn hot against your skin as they narrow and focus on their prey.
Fangs are bared.
Claws revealed.
The vampire is in and waiting.
The demons laugh and dance as this is their hour,
the hour of fear and shadow.
They taunt us, their movements mercurial and strange in our cellular world, seemingly dissolved by the descent of that blessed orb over the edge of the Earth.
We still feel their foul icy breath as we hide beneath our ragged covers.
The monster is no longer merciful,
or benevolent.
He is what he has always been.
A loathsome creature, cursed at his very birth into this paradise.
His true pleasure comes from the pain he inflicts without remorse.
He is aroused by our fear.
Our cries make him stiffen and validate his virility.
He is an equal opportunity villain.
There is no victim that entices him more than another.
He resents their humanity.
He mocks their humility.
He despises them for their ability to love.
He convinces himself that they are things, lower than even him.
So he inflicts his pain as he ambles and rambles through our fear
filled darkness, which aids him in his treachery and deception.
He is a coward, saving himself above all others.
He is a destroyer of all that is good.
The trickster confuses his prey with his duplicity...
confused prey are easier to kill.
So that long, dark night that seemingly goes on forever, defiles and brings to ruin the heart of what is good,
of what loved him in spite of himself.
And as night follows day, so day follows night.
That dark grey tomb rises with the soft illumination and is replaced by shades of pinks and purples, the harbingers of that bright star that saves us!
Saves us from our vampires...
our demons...
our monsters.
And we are once again blinded to the truth, either by the blinding brightness or that familiar sleight of hand,
the monsters magick.
So we forgive, and believe, and lie safely in the monsters arms.
Once again he is beautiful, benevolent, our Messiah that was prophesied to us in our fairy tales so many lives ago.
He is our lover...
we submit all that we are to him in our gratitude.
He is our priest...
we confess all of our weaknesses to glorify him.
He is our mentor...
we seek all of his wisdom and guidance as he is the gifted one.
At least until the darkness illuminates his true nature.
Life is a series of opposites and contradictions.
The world flips and changes moment by moment.
Such is the nature of the monster.
Such is the nature of man.
Duplicity is not reserved for one or the other only.
And our efforts at piety make us glow like the ember of a cigarette, making us easier targets for snipers...
and monsters.