Monster

There is a monster that lives in the doorway between nearly and known.

It doesn't have monster claws, it has your mother’s eyes, your own voice. Your laugh played back to you in a room that's far too silent 

So who are you?.

I don't mean your perfectly performed polished biography.

Or beautiful ruins arranged under gallery lighting.

When the sentence begins, hands shaking, nobodys applauding and there is a monster that lives in the doorway between nearly and known.

It doesn't have monster claws, it has your mother’s eyes, your own voice. Your laugh played back to you in a room too silent 

Who are you?.

And no I don't mean your perfectly performed polished biography.

Or your cleverness. Or the beautiful ruins arranged under gallery lighting.

Scared that if all of you is seen, where will it end. The monster waits.

Every time someone reaches for your wrist and says stay.”

Every time you're asking after the truth, not that truth, the truth under the truth.

Every time someone looks at your face too long,

I think this is where I become unbearable and they discover the basement, the beasts, the unfinished rooms, and the weird feeling in my chest.

So I run, or joke, either become magnificent or disappear in plain sight.

The secrets are an easier burden than being fully witnessed.

Maybe rejection is survivable but being loved accurately is a dreadful animal.

To be looked at and not edited, stand with your strange little universe open,  your unsent letters, and all the impossible wanting..

Waiting and then nothing, just someone saying Oh, there you are, I wondered when you’d arrive.

The monster suddenly shrinks awsy into something harmless.. into a bridge.

And on the other side is God.

On the other side is intimacy. And omething larger than cinema.

Like standing at the edge of the sea and recognising the ocean is entering you back.

The infinite euphoria because someone complets you, because you survived, and remained yourself.

And another asked for more

Said Yes, please stay.

And tell about the unknown forest, spent years circling in the dark.. It finally opens.

But there was no monster inside at all.

Only a doorway and two people frightened and sacred discovering being seen honestly, it doesn't kill you.

It returns you.

Every time