The Beast In Every Man
Deeper Inside Him Also Lies His Angel
There is a beast in every man — something huge and dark something dangerous, something he may not know. Even when he knows, he may still not know how wild it could be until it is unleashed and it goes on a rampage that shocks to the marrows and leaves him to wonder if he can ever tame it.
He would prefer it to hide, to lie down alone, and to snooze quietly on, in the reinforced cage, not chained on one limp: certain that when it bolts it can create destruction and heavy devastation and devour everything his reputation included, his relationships upended and leave ugly track marks and wide scars on its paths.
He prefers it stays unseen for as long as it could though it smiles at him when he looks in the mirror and when the lights are dim, or when it yawns in the morning. He provides it accommodation or what is called containment until it learns only to purr and forgets how to roar a wild thing in the house yet the gates stay locked so it roams familiar grounds.
It is in the nature of things: two sides of the same coin a dark spot on every bean, the one bright and beautiful around the head a glowing halo, on the walls the tagging shadows of the dark and dangerous, the one with stunted horns. All things cast their shadows until suffused by the light — where there’s no day and night, when all over is bright no sure left, no certain right no wrong and no right.
It couldn’t be otherwise. In duality is that reality; as in head and tail, beginning and end, the male and the female, the North and the south. Out of the light realms we travel the gray vales and struggle through the dark tunnels until — if we brace to weather the suffocating pressure — we are helped and pulled into the waiting light again.
Light at end of the tunnel not just a poet’s metaphor, unless where it’s a dead end. For when our task is here done we walk through the dark til’ we are born(e) again into that big bright light. That’s how we journey on from the dark to the shadows to find our way back to the light, of awareness of knowledge, of our own self-consciousness, of reaffirmation of our being. From darkness of memories lost, to learn again to cope and hope, to survive and to flourish and blossom to a new life.
Here’s Nature’s way for same : on a leaf, there’s laid a tiny egg from it comes crawling lava; it may wear poisonous spikes to deter the preying predators and consumes plumes on its way, leaving dark droppings all over. Then in a time of transformation it folds into a mummified pupa, and with it the transfiguration through that dark tunnel ride, the long night of its walled soul when the body miracle happens.
It breaks into lighter surrounding and senses the rush of a new dawn, that daylight that was always there. And in brave unhurried bravado emerges from a dead cocoon a bold and beautiful butterfly with majesty in its powdery wings and high hat carriage and taste, now a discerning probing tongue in place of its crude mowing jaws.
From crawling and worming about to now flying and gliding all over, from chomping up only roughages to sucking sweet nectar blends, pollinating the delicate flowers fertilizing the plants of the land, from soiling up the ground below to brighten up all the meadows, and from those dense shadows something new embraces the light. The devil has turned to an angel, going through that underpass to break again into the light and live a life well-meant and full. There’s the beast in every man; his angel too hides inside him
OU082020