The Monster Challenges

IV: IDENTITY

Just as a rowboat scrapes the pebbled beach
I drift back from my sleep to feel the bed.
Receding like the tide, just out of reach,
The dream slips, half-remembered, from my head.
A nightly riddle posed, always the same:
It asks me who I am, beyond my name.

The question's asked again out in the crowd
Reflected in a stranger's troubled glance,
As though I were an insult spat out loud,
Or warning 'gainst the fickle whims of Chance.
Philosophers in centuries long past
Wrote cunning answers all about God's plan:
Which creatures He made first, and made the last,
The proper rank and order meant for Man.
But creatures like myself did not belong
{We were the curly brackets of their set}.
To illustrate, by living, all that's Wrong,
So people learn God's Truth, and not forget.
A doctrine set in stone (or so it seems);
It cracks, a little, nightly, in my dreams.

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Also, I've got a video for each poem, now. They're all in a playlist on YouTube, here: The Monster Challenges: A poem cycle

Ideas are starting to coalesce around #5...