So…given my penchant for black clothes and things macabre, I tend to come across a certain set of pensively/depressed folk.  This really isn’t my bag.  And I had a reaction to it…well, the character of Crow, the sardonic, dark Muse of my epic, had a reaction when he came across this type.  Crow wanted to rip into her…and the cool/strange thing that happens, when a character develops enough, is that you have to let them do what they want, they grow wills and become autonomous.  It’s kind of funny.  It pokes fun at the very type of person that might want to read my dark, dark story.  But then, Crow is of the Trickster archetype and that is a character who not only attacks other characters, but threatens to tear down his/her own mythology.  And Crow does this to.  He makes fun of my story several times, makes sure the reader knows it’s not a “proper” epic.

 

So here’s his reaction to tragically hip youngster who might be writing cutesy suicide poems on a Hello Kitty notepad while sipping overpriced, burnt coffee…

 

[Don’t worry if you’re skipping any excerpts until you can see the larger whole.  This is kind of stand alone.  And a special note – “Ghede” is the death Loa of Voodoo culture.  He’s a grinning trickster himself, much different than the grim Deaths of Europe.]

 

 

 

Crow, I see,

I see a young lady,

wandering the isles and stacks of

candy, dirty magazines, and snacks.                          

She’s all in black and lace

and ebony eye makeup.

And she wears an over-practiced frown.

Up and down, she wears skulls,

but these aren’t Ghede skulls,

these aren’t grinin’ skulls,

they have adolescent frowns.

 

All hail the Brooding Queen.

Seldom seen.

Silent scream.

Too tragically hip,

too poetically pensive.

She struts and struts all in black,

brooding Byronically –

pouts and frowns –

plays with her toy pain –

dresses it,

poses it for all to see

adolescently.  She pets her pet, pain.

She does not know

the first syllable of the encyclopedia of Real Pain.

She will not sing her melancholy directly,

but tries to transmit it through reverse-osmosis-telepathy.

But no one sees.

No one looks at the Brooding Queen.

And she’s sinkin’ fast in the quagmire, quicksand despair.

But, to be fair

it’s self-inflicted despair, self-centered despair.

She wears despair like a hip-hip hat,

and she’d never care

to give it up.

It’s too-too tragically cool

and too-too comfortable

to wear.

And she’s sinkin’ fast in the quagmire, quicksand despair,

till she’s just a face in the ground,

feet tramplin’ her frown.

They all see me, she thinks.

They all know. They all feel bad. They all see how pained I am.
But no one sees the brooding queen.

No one remembers.

She does not remember.

She cannot remember why she started brooding . . .