BEAUTY BEAST
From the void there is a royal trumpet call,
Distant fanfares that vanish into night.
From the shadows there are the whisperings,
Formless words that yearn to speak.
From a blackened pit a creature bellows
Somewhere but nowhere –
A hollow soul that stalks the foreverness…
Seeking… just a simple sight.
The glimpse of just one other soul and light.
It thunders, somber beastly sounds
that echo back upon itself.
With Heaven’s fortress mute…
It has no choice but to cry and cry again,
This and all and every time.
It has no choice but to cry and cry again.
But the creature knows, this too well
(For it is the very fact of knowing that is the curse)
That It is what It is.
Too monstrous for the human world.
Too Divine for its own.
Yet somewhere, someone had heard the call.
It is in the air, the scent is all too clear
With one last anguished fear –
The creature now retreats -- to hide,
to wait, to prepare, to see -
Is this the one?
To unlock its legend-locked cage?
Beauty -- all that she is supposed to be,
Enchanted by the castle that only she can see,
Entering through a gate of light,
To a place of beauty so absolute
It can only be seen by vision of purist sight.
At first too dim for even her to see,
One by one each translucent sight
Takes on form and substance,
Matter made of mirrors,
Reflections of but one Beauty,
Who enters the vision of her own peerless light.
Yet just behind the veil
The creature can only wait and watch.
There is no other way.
For it is Beauty who must make the choice.
The creature disguises Itself as the eyelight bird
To watch Beauty dance within this prison of prismed light,
Beast sends to her its servants(fragments always of itself) to say,
"All that you have ever wished… will be yours,
Only never ask what we be behind this shadow mask."
Rainbowed bird-like lights,
Who with but a thought
Fulfill every dream and fancy free,
Lift Beauty aloft
To soar through clouds and past whirling mists of moons and stars,
To touch the outer edge
Of what once had been her one and only distant dream.
Unleashed from imagination's shell,
She sees…
All there is, was, and will ever be.
Beauty asleep,
Embraced by the scents of self,
Tosses and turns,
The Beast's desires - awakening - in her.
And on its throne the Creature – waits
Wondering if the woman will find its flower.
Beast approaches
As Beauty in her restless dreaming
Feels the Beast that is there,
Hovering, wordlessly.
Wrapping covers around herself,
She caresses her own a secret lover thoughts.
Beast watches...As covers drift away.
Flying through the chamber.
Night thoughts come to life.
Stepping forth from the shadow mare
The horror that is the Beast.
Beauty has glimpsed the face
As it truly is.
She has broken her promise not to see.
The creature must attack...
That is the creed --
Expose the true terror of Beast's outer shell.
Screams and bellows ...
Beauty runs
But Hobgoblin's beauty birds,
Transformed to primordial monster masks
Follow Beauty to bind and bound
Rips her
tearing,
leaving nothing,
She -- more entangled --
Caught in the giant spider net.
Beast alone
All its hopes and prayers
Are no more.
Beauty broke her word
Looked into the pit of where it lived
House of its own despair.
A tired yearning that begins again
The same eternal round of desiring.
Beast snarls at God Himself
For having damned it
To this cave of never ending hollowness.
A thread of light.
Beauty has returned.
A single tear she found upon her cheek
As turned her from fear to love.
Beast hesitates.
With a tremulous hope it reaches out to her
Tentative, tenderly Beauty tries to touch
such an enigmatic light creatured race.
At first Beast is still unsure.
It has been so long.
But with her hand
They begin their dance.
Light Beast expands in the first rapture of love returned,
Circling back upon itself.
The creature that is beast swirls out of reach
and disappears.
Beauty is alone
Behind her there is a brilliant light
...Her Prince
Beckons that she follow him.
Prince and his Beauty vanish
To the far side of a galaxied starry night
The rainbowed birds,
The ones who were but the last facets
Of what was the Beast
Now begin to disappear
Their work is long last done.
As Beauty Beast lingers in the milkied way,
The colored plumaged birds softly leave their trace
Relinquishing their hold on light
Returning to home to their nest of ancient Nothingness.
Such is the tale that is told and told again
Of Love wrapped in cold embrace
That given but its chance
Finds behind every mask
Both Beauty and the Beast.