The Awful Potential

Don't tell me the sins of the Father will be

visited on the son. I know this already. It is

my story, full of hatred and frightened villagers.

They have howled of my Awful Potential,

and called me "Frankenstein's Monster"…

... they are liars. They lie.

My name is Adam, and I know I am

not lovable. I am too unsettling to gaze

upon. My skin is not like yours

of the living, and I’m a stitched puzzle to God.

My flat skull, they say, is because 

God looked down at me and said "Man

is capable of both right and wrong. But this?

This is a sin so original in its arrogance

that there was no plan for its punishment.

"This," God said, "Is NOT Mine!"

Well, let God hate me then, I never asked

to be born. But assembled into this world.

all I wanted were the same answers, same

questions as anyone: Who am I? Why am I

here? I was no miracle of motherless birth,

I was a mistake; stolen into being, lightning

in my blood. My Father was hailed "The

Modern Prometheus", but look deeper within

the myth: Prometheus was a thief. Rejected

by my father, by God, I wandered by night

or deep forest. No one would believe me

if I told them about the young girl I found

kneeling in the field and picking flowers.

My heart was moved. I did not know I could

feel it. Absolutely unafraid, she smiled at me

and all my strength went weak before her.

We threw flowers in the stream and laughed

as they swirled... until someone in her family

screamed! Then out came the villagers,

every torch and pitchfork one of them. All

howling of my Awful Potential, of these arms

that could break them, a body that doesn't bleed,

a creature that feared nothing...except for fire.

So it was behind fire they found their courage,

and as they drove me back, I stared them down

and saw the truth in their eyes: when they dream

it is of miracles and immortality, but awake, they are

sons of Caine, they kill because that is what they

do; even murder their own dreams. But then

these are people who worship a God who allowed

his own son to die horribly, just to prove a point.

A God that named every Angel He ever burned.

In great irony, the villagers drove me back home

to my father's castle, in the shape of all his sins

revisiting, come back as my hand at his throat.

I look at the villagers: all torches and farm-tools

of hate; I look at my father and all that came about

because of his Science and mad resolve; and I look

straight into the eyes of God. I know there is Awful

Potential behind all of this... but it is NOT in me.