Monster

 "I have love in me the likes of which you can scarcely imagine, and rage the likes of which you would not believe. If I cannot satisfy the one, I will indulge the other."
- Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

I survey
The lay of the land
By mapping 
The bruises pressed into
My emotions...
Delicate things,
Always have been...
The precursors of intellect
Existing long before
Logic evolves...
Made up of bits and pieces 
Of long deceased ancestors,
All of us...
The double-heliacal thread
Winding around the caduceus,
Reaching back 
To the first moment
Of abiogenesis...
A lightning strike
Under just the right conditions 
On a planet
In just the right spot
In its heliocentric orbit...
The sweet spot...
Nothing is learned,
It is simply remembered,
As the ancients say...
Primordial thoughts
Spanning millennium
Course through
These veins...
And yours...
And yours...
And yours...
Promethean chains
Spiraling 
Generation to generation...
I apply cartographic principles
As I walk the land masses
Formed by emotion...
As foreign to me
As it is
To any outside observer
Of this creature...
This creation...
Delicate things
Striving for balance...
A stoic appearance,
The crust and upper mantle,
Protecting 
What is plastic...
Soft and hot...
Thin sheet of skin
Drifting slowly...
Change taking eons
When left alone,
Or strikingly abrupt
When exposed...
A barbarism
Called home...
So many
False starts and miscarriages...
So many dead branches
And cataclysms 
Before I came to be...
Somewhere inside 
I hold all of their memories
Even while my own
Seems to have so many
Holes...
So many apparent misunderstandings...
I remember to breathe
Slowly
As I try to steady the sextant
Under those slowly drifting stars...
Temporal waves
Rocking me gently,
But still darkening
Like a freshly bruised pear...
As delicate as these things are...