My shoulders will never be broad and wing-scarred,
They form no majestic plane, only hunched shame
Marred not by defiance, but by self-obliteration
So familiar and unconscious it took years to find a name.
I will never fill out a suit with anything but convexity,
Or be able to bring my self to utter anything
That could be transcribed as a "sultry purr".
I cannot help but wonder if life would be easier if I could.
But neither am I a shining, radiant being of light,
Flawless and austere and pure and cold, so cold,
As I so often aspired--no--tried to force myself to be.
There is no romance (ha) in unassailability
When it comes not as strength, but as a sinking uneasiness.
Conviction is reserved for those whose hearts glitter
With diamond--not mica.
Perhaps I enjoyed a first few fledgling flaps, but really,
I was born falling.
I am neither demon nor angel, cannot be.
What a strange place, this interface, dividing
The fires of earth from the coldest of skies.
We are warm meat over cold bone,
Cold logic over warm feeling,
And we know not which holds the truth.
One expects Genesis from this juxtaposition, and receives humanity.
A thermodynamic eddy, an unresolved chord,
Swirling and sustaining for the briefest of moments before rejoining the abyss.
But if this is humanity, what, then, am I?
Not eternal, yet not organic,
Belonging to neither the earth nor the skies,
Fallen from nowhere to nowhere while never leaving the ground.
Neither black nor white nor any grey in between,
I radiate in the infrared and ultraviolet.
I have no place in your allegories, narratives, and morals,
For I defy naming not by omnipotence or supreme evil
But complete, utter, perfect alienness.
Watching from afar these dramas of gods and angels and demons and men,
I idly wonder why none of them look a thing like me.