"Better a fallen rocket than never a burst of light."
~ Tom Stoppard, The Invention of Love

Wednesday, April 30, 2014

Poem: Frankenstein's Monster Has Words with His Maker (2014)


Because it's my blog and I'll shamelessly self-promote if I want to, I'm wrapping up the month with an original poem.  To ease you in, it's based on one of the pieces I reviewed earlier (twice!,) Danny Boyle's Frankenstein.

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Frankenstein’s Monster Has Words with His Maker

I could have loved you.
I was born in lightning,
Lit by the spark of your genius,
And you were my god.
Though I wasn’t formed of your dust or your rib,
I was made of you all the same.
You fashioned me from your sweat,
Your scope, and your hunger,
And I’d have been your opus if you’d let me –
Oh, if only you had let me.

Instead, my life – (you gave me life;
The size of it!) – my life
Was a no-thing for you to discard
When the equation grew unruly.
You left me to your harsh world
With its noise and heat and heat and hate,
Where I was kicked at and snarled at,
And my being-aliveness battered at me
In ways man wasn’t meant to face alone.

You thought I was built for your annotation,
That I ceased to persist when the figures were erased,
But the experiment has climbed out of your hypotheses
And lives beyond your reckoning of him.

I – your idea, your creation, your man – stand now before you.
The scars my wanderings have earned me
Crisscross against the roughly-sewn stitches
With which you patched my piecemeal body together.
Look into eyes you plucked from a grave, and tell me:
Scientist, what have you wrought?

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