A Necessary Monster
We do not know what the dragon means, just as we do not know the meaning of the universe, but there is something in the image of the dragon that is congenial to man’s imagination… It is, one might say, a necessary monster.
Jorge Luis Borges
The Book of Imaginary Beings (1954)
Awaken in me the right principles
for entreating myself, most elegantly
to dispatch and give up
all of my gold
to someone else's glazed, garrulous lair.
I'm the wrong kind of big brown fire-snake,
the wrong kind of dare
(and I wouldn't play games with the universe if I were you.
Because it tends to always and universally play fair).
I am a very unusual kind of paladin.
A joy luck boy of the living.
A refusal to descend into glorious, willfully blind sin.
I do not enjoy being heroic
but merely breathing some flame
into the wrong kind of listening ear
gives me my name.
Prawn digivolves to crab, which warp digivolves
to lobster? I need a new bestiary
and I intend to not necessarily be its inventor,
or its architect
or even emperor (!)
but its Dreamtiger,
someone who reflects
on themselves enough
to generate respect for the tough
minds that blowtorch themselves with force
so that in the furnace,
what is left behind
is more rigorous than anything that has come before:
Diamond scales.
A creolecomputational mind.
And a glittering hoard of treasure
called the heart, and soul, and what you find left over
when the body Merlionsmanic has been ground up for coffee and spices and trauma
and left behind
to transform itself
into a dancing tongue of flame.
Into a higher power that has no name
other than this
in the literature:
Purple Dragon,
genus: Kristang cutiepie.
Even more common name:
Resurrection Flower.