to be Frank

I see the sutures, a little too loosely sewn; the thread's color is a little off, brown in places where the crimson of the blood has been forgotten.  This Frankenstein is sleeping.  A quilt unto himself.  He is losing batting and losing heat.  He could keep no one warm.  Every inch of him recalls the grave, his flesh like the cool soil, the temperature of death, the temperature of waiting...

Each of them is constructing their own monster.  Out of the pieces of the world's broken ideas, out of the mass grave of notions, writhing like worms, they select the body parts, a jigsaw of beliefs to assemble into a philosophy, a religion, a reason...  This is the stuffed animal,  the teddy bear, the tar baby; this is the straw man.  The fluff in their own heads has gotten wet, heavy or ignited by some wayward ember and remembered by flames.

The Heart Quickens

These lines are the capillaries that carry the myth.

Crowd them with your desire.  Design
a man (or a monster)
to measure this bed and breathe the dead
air from his lungs.
Under the thicket,
thickened by dreams, the body begins
to stir. I have heard the urgent murmurs,
that first strangled gasp.  If he doesn't cry,
he isn't alive.

The revival is electric.  A writhing, rhythmic choir
defies the devil and the hot, night air.
With simple hymns and a convoluted theology,
they will convert you.  The holy spirit has decided;
he conspires
to ignite the monster's tongue.  The sparks
spit from the anvil might be
fireflies, or lightening.  The sky
is too hospitable to legends.  The clouds
get caught on the mountains
like a knot, on a comb.

He is screaming.

Bad dreams seem less
austere in daylight (when compared...)...

You tear the linen,
you upset the bed
when you discover the body,
blue beside you.  He is grinning.
With sinister lips
that curl back from teeth
lacquered brown by his bad habits,
he should have spoken up.
This was a second opportunity, missed,
to choose his final words. 

Instead, unheard from,
his voice trails off...
like smoke from a switch
or the bolt
from the blue skin,
protruding.

Frankenstein

The electricity jangled through my ganglia getting stuck in the kinks, the energy lost when it tried to fire down the length of a spiral of nerves. The stickiness in the switches smothered the fire leaving a twitching body by the side of the road, a rising stiffness, a tightening in my throat, my countless digits, trembling. It is colder in the world than it is in the grave. My master says. I am an assemblage of many men. The sinew and skin is sutured together with a dissolving filament, the thread of fading memory. Why am I so frightening? It is not so much my appearance as it is my gait, the hesitant, halting, awkward movements and the gurgling groans that make up my speech. I remind them of death (and dying). And they remind me of life's mysteries and the absolute knowledge that I will never penetrate these.