Alter Egos

Hello, lovely POW ladies (and Tyrion who NEVER EVER READS),

I thought I'd follow up my ridiculously long previous post with this creative one. I've been thinking about alter egos a lot lately. Obviously super heroes have mild mannered alter egos and normal people can have violent ones vis-a-vis Tyler Durden from Fight Club, but I think alter egos can also be a way of thinking about and conceptualizing a part of yourself that is hard to deal with. Lately, I've been realizing that self love is a big struggle for me and I need to find a way I can embrace and deal with even the parts of me that may not be as pretty. I know Ada has spent a lot of time conceptualizing her own muses with the Woman in White and Woman in Black, and this feels like sort of a similar creative/emotional exercise for me.

That brings me to this creative endeavor. I made up an alter ego called ZK. She's a hyper-violent, hyper-sexual, quasi goth/punk, smoking/drinking debaucherous woman. Though a lot of her tendencies are self-destructive or violent, there is also a part of her that is protective toward the innocent. Ultimately, even though a lot of parts of her are crazy, she is not all bad. She's sort of my id.

I've been writing sort of narrative poetry (is that a thing) and short stories about her that are all in one document on my computer. Whether or not they're going to go anywhere, I'd like to share a couple of poems with you here.

Without further ado, introducing the lovely ZK.

                                                                                                              

A Declaration from the Lady Herself

Ladies,

Penis-Havers,

Those with Genitalia of Other Varieties or Names,

I wish to address you today, as your new goddess.

Yes, this does mean you’ll have to give up

                your milquetoast deities.

Lords of fund management and fiscal responsibility,

Idols of kept seconds, stored for hard times,

And lesser cherubs of tepid love and measured euphoria.

Rough, man,

                It’s hard to give up mediocrity I know.

But I promise, in its place you will find,

                The life of lust licked lips and vibrating rosaries,

                A renewed commitment to taking illicit substances from strangers

                                and empty calories from exuberant (but largely alien) lovers,

                And a world of promise

                                And dangers,

                                And terrible, lip-biting surrender,

                To that thing you haven’t even admitted you want yet.

All hail ZK.

Goddess in chief.

Haver of subjects and worshippers.

Bringer of hedonistic revival to the boredom scorched

night scene.

True

It wasn’t love,

                that drove her to it.

Writing crazy notes and leaving them on the top of his

water heater.

Buying him little trinkets,

like that locket from his dead mother,

and burying them

in his house plants.

It wasn’t love, exactly,

                that made her follow him.

Through the streets of his neighborhood,

Sitting on his porch at midnight, smoking a blunt,

Carving love songs into the wood of his door frame.

Something darker drove those urges.

But that night when she was breaking into his basement,

                and fell through that skylight

                to discover his little sister crying in the cellar.

Sixteen-years-confused and heart a wreck,

Self esteem flowing out of little sister’s eyes,

Skewed vision of beauty showing in the borrowed eye shadow and the

                cuts on the inside of her too-skinny arms.

ZK got up and brushed off the glass.

She leaned over and took the girl’s face in her hand,

And squished it hard.

“It’s such a shame that they’ll all have to go through life

                never realizing,

                how beautiful you are.”

ZK then got up,

declared her intention to ransack the boy’s underthings,

kissed the girl on the cheek,

and left.

That.

That was love.

The hardest and best kind,

Love of a stranger to the needy,

Love of other.

Love of self.