The Beast
There is a Beast in you.
And there is nowhere left to look
but inward.
If you haven't reconciled with your Beast, how will your son?
The Beast's Lament
Do you know what it takes
to chain something that only wants to laugh, love, and play?
To muzzle a creature honest enough to say when it hurts?
But you locked me in a cage.
No. No.
It's worse than that.
It's more like being locked in the trunk of a car,
while the other half of you is driving away from the scene of the crime,
but he doesn’t even know what he did.
If only he would just pop the trunk.
Your ancestors gave blood, sweat,
sang to the Fire,
danced in gratitude,
howled in reverence through me.
I am the flesh of the Fire.
Its voice vibrating through you.
But now?
You mock me.
You shame me.
You exile me.
And look at what you’ve become.
You put boys in chairs and demand stillness.
You medicate play.
Shame the Fire.
The boy's relentless Fire reminds adults what still lives flickering withing them.
It forces the remembrance your society has worked so hard to prevent.
A society that has pathologized pain and fear,
as if they are something you can cure and discard.
My most primordial purposes!
Now treated.
Managed as debased chores.
You see me raw in your children,
In their favorite games,
grasping dinosaurs while they surrender to sleep.
I am still here in you.
No matter how puny the pittance of attention.
No matter how scaly the scrapes you feed me.
The Old Ways have died.
Their wisdom died with them.
You are still at war with me.
I am not your enemy.
I am the power, the wisdom, the instinct,
the reason you are not extinct,
I have been banished to the shadows for wishful thinking.
Something to rise above.
A nuisance.
A servant at best.
Look at your society now.
Truth traded for theory.
Pain traded for performance.
Fear traded for comfort.
Fire traded for pharmaceuticals.
Attention traded for algorithms.
I am not sin.
I am not evil.
I am not violence.
I am vitality.
I don’t choose violence
I don’t make the choices.
I am the choice.
I am wisdom for the honest.
Courage for the daring.
The ache that never leaves until it’s heard.
I am the current that creates and destroys.
Everything you’ve forgotten.
Everything that still moves inside you.
Fear is my food.
The unknown my battlefield of transcendence.
Where the Fire can create and become.
Music is my voice.
The body is my language —
every organ, hormone, nerve, breath —
each a tone through which I move.
I am the pulse that drives the emotive engine of humanity.
Hate, love, and the trembling space between.
My currents are the Fire’s movement within you.
I am your authenticity.
You have become a machine without me.
I can only carry your grief for so long.
Enter the labyrinth,
feel the Fire,
restore what you are.
or....
Watch your life from a distance.
Watch your son from a distance,
This is the choice.
Grasp onto your story.
Your favorite lullaby.
Or
Reconcile with me.
You need me. I need you.
Together is the only way.
I still be here waiting.
