For the final Sunday and to begin the last week of National Poetry Month, I’ve been egged on to the sunny task of writing a poem that describes using hard-boiled simile. The prompt suggested similes such as those used in detective stories featuring a tough unsentimental protagonist with a matter-of-fact attitude towards violence. I slipped in some horror genre.
The moon that night reflected light outlining everything and everyone with tarnished silver lines and a grayish tint covering, like the lining of an old vampire’s coffin. Our faces were puffed and molted like poisoned mushrooms on stems growing out of our jackets. The tree we hung him from looked like a dragon’s skull with dead, dried bones — fingers and hands protruding in all directions. It was as bleak and hopeless as a baby’s funeral. The smell was as if standing in an old open crypt exuding the musty odors of long dead flesh. Gravediggers’ shovels made rhythmic sounds cutting earth like piercing chunks of lead striking burned ashes of dead bodies. No one made another sound. Each wondered if we had killed him dead enough, or would he rise again like the devil’s undead corruption? It was our common thought, a fear that united our cause but shadowed our minds like a haunting nightmare’s gloom. We were men, but that night we were like the evil undead lamenting a hopeless mantle of some human hell.
Look both ways when identifying good and evil.
Each defines the other by its absence, yet the absence of one makes the other incomparable.
Mind the gaps when laying blame. Nothing is perfect.
Jekyll and Hyde (The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde [1886] by Robert Louis Stevenson)
This classic was written 130 years ago. It is available free on Amazon and you can add an audio version for about a dollar. Even in the book, the age old struggle of people to understand and to deal with the dual nature of mankind is acknowledged.
Third, when Dr. Hastie Lanyon is faced with the reality of the dark side, he is so overcome with the news (provided as proof when he witnesses Hyde’s transformation to Jekyll) that evil lurks in the embodiment of all men that he dies. He even says he will die, and why. This is in spite of the fact that Jekyll explains it all to him. Why did Lanyon die? Because he too had a dark side, but he never believed that he did. He never accepted his true and complete nature. Essentially, his own sin of pride killed him.
I do strongly favor the concept of living in the moment, my own version of Carpe Diem works for me. I did notice that in his final confession, when Jekyll is referring to the nature of Hyde (which is supposed to be Jekyll’s own dark nature), he says “…his circumscription to the moment…” in such a way as to condemn it. Embrace it, Harry. It really is all that we have: right here, right now.
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