Once upon a time there was an artist who was too busy struggling against the
expectations of his father to create the great works that he was meant to create.
Which is why he fought, and fought the wrong way.
Most aborted artists are like that.
He was too innocent; not cunning enough to protect himself.
Artists are like that, a lot of them.
His only sin was in loving too much.
In the filth and darkness of a back alley the artist was swallowed
whole by a demon more potent than the ones he found in his groin and
the bottle - she became his mother, his midwife, and his abortionist.
He thought the demon set him free the night she gave birth to him.
But it was only another trap.
A nicely decorated trap.
Some mothers are bad mothers.
Once upon a time there was a little girl, a prophetess, who saw things that she
didn't understand and frightened everyone around her with her screams.
Fearing her strangeness, they kept her at a distance.
They didn't know that isolation only made her visions all the more unbearable.
Her only sin was in loving too much.
One night she met an artist who thought himself free, who along with his mother,
drove the little girl mad before giving birth to her fully grown.
Her madness garbled her visions so that the new creature was of no use to anyone
including herself.
The prophetess needed an interpreter to explain her visions to her and to the
world so that she could understand what she was seeing.
One night she slipped her leash and found a poet with a broken heart.
Poets are interpreters.
Even when everyone around them says they are bad poets.
So the little girl ate the poet alive and gave birth to a new creature.
Once upon a time there was a poet who wore his heart on his sleeve.
His timidity made him borrow the voices of other poets when his real voice would
have rivaled theirs had he only the courage to speak up.
This timidity made the herd around him contemptuous.
In their contempt, the herd mocked what it didn't understand.
Which broke the poet's heart.
His only sin was in loving too much.
One night when his heart was screaming bloody raw, his poetry devoured him alive
in the dark and the dirt of a back alley when it should have consoled him.
Poetry made flesh spat him out as a new creature before he could become what
he was born to become.
A voice was stilled forever because this new creature was more intent upon destruction than interpretation.
Interpretation is what the mother who midwifed him needed most of all.
Too bad.
Once upon a time there were three bent demons, each one siring the other in
a long thorny family tree made of broken peacock feathers held together by the
bloody raw bones and still quivering sinews of aborted masterpieces.
Devouring each other in a long Oroboros Worm of shared destruction.
The artist.
The prophetess.
The poet.
One to have the visions.
One to render the visions visible.
One to interpret the visions.
Too bad they all died before they were born.