UNNATURAL MONSTERS AND TROUBLED THOUGHTS

THE MONSTER

I think about the moments that have passed me

since I met you, and the moments that led to my death which you created.

Not a physical death, but a death of the heart.

There's something about love that kills a man, especially when it was so innocent.

Am not saying I was an innocent man

but my love was pure because it had the best intentions.

I wasn't like those men: the playboys or careless men who toyed with women.

And your right,

I was dangerous,

a damned motherfucker with a blood hand.

I would take anyone without a second thought.

But you can't condemn me, my life was hard,

the enemies in my face were cocksuckers,

they took what they wanted by force,

and I took from them, so of course I had to be strong.

Do I regret anything? no,

in this life you live without regrets.

I can't see you face to face, wish I could,

but maybe it's better,

who knows if I would smash your face in a wall.

A monster can only love like a monster,

that's what they called me, but honestly, I could care less about titles or tags.

I lived to survive and i couldn't follow the rules,

but i have a question for you.

If you didn't have to follow the rules, would you?

This people call you "Queen Of England."

They act like they love you,

like they share your cares,

they can't pretend properly

and you can't hate them properly.

That's why you search for distractions like me.

And maybe your a monster like me,

a different kind, the deceptive kind of monster that devours, destroys and disappears.

You lie to yourself, I accept who i am.

I remember the trees of Maradosa,

and the whirlwind of Zimbabwe.

The short-term freedom we enjoyed there,

the joy in your eyes, the sex in your thighs,

such wildness that was undefined.

I gave you the excitement that young girls dream of.

What a shameless queen you are,

oh what the people will say,

now you think about such things?

back then you didn't.

I watch the days pass by,

i hear the whispers,

but my mind feels dull.

I imagine myself approaching your tower,

killing all the guards,

taking you away,

maybe that would make me feel alive,

create some kind of tension in my heart,

this dullness, this boredom is not me.

However, this is the reality of losing you,

the reality of the life of a monster who loves a Queen.

Pain is a bitch i am used to.

But this feeling of loss is new,

because I never cared for anything.

It made me the most deadly enemy,

but now it's different.

I actually feel like i lost something.

This is also the reality of being weak.

The reality of the life of a monster torn between love and hate.

You said destruction and death follow me everywhere i go, but what about you?

The Queen who has to sacrifice some peasants to keep her throne.

The Queen who has killed for the nobles, taken their bribery and jailed them.

The Queen who fucks a secret man and does everything for her own selfish self.

What about you my Queen?

This is my reply to your request.

I will never give up my desire or my thoughts for you.

If you can't love me, then you have to kill me,

if you can't kill me, then i will love you.

THE QUEEN

I will tell you first how i spend my days since we concluded our excitements.

I wake up in the morning, i don't talk much,

i don't smile, i eat quietly and i stare at the skies,

the birds, the fishes and the suitors.

I get irritated talking talking for too long.

I get tired of my suitors.

They all act like proper men,

speaking the best words,

maintaining proper manners,

while boasting sufficiently of their achievements.

Sometimes I enjoy toying with them,

playing with their ambitions,

it's all a game to them.

When they see me, they see influence, lands, power and sex.

I don't blame them,

they were born, groomed, prepared, trained and strengthened to claim power.

But why do I endure it?

This madness, this greed that surrounds me.

Because I have to?

Because I believe in duty?

No, because this is the best life I can live.

My monster,

i love you, i cherish you, but think about this:

I was born a princess without a brother for a prince.

What other choice do I have?

What better life could I live?

If I runaway with you, what life would it be?

If I should predict,

we would be poor,

We would be violent and eventually bored.

Poor because you have nothing to sustain me.

Violent because the royal guard would be after us.

Bored because it would all be pointless at the end.

What is love?

What is death?

What is life?

This are the questions I ask myself.

I sometimes tell the piano man to play me a tune,

a sad tune.

So I can think about our love, our guilt and our pain.

We had the best time of my life.

But like a wise man once said "All good things must come to an end."

That wise man, was you,

and i bet you don't remember.

But those were your words when you left me for war.

You wanted blood so bad, you denied love,

you broke my heart, my soul, my hope,

Because you were delusional.

You expected that I would always be there.

waiting for you, desiring you,

feeling horny at the thought of you,

but life is a rushing wind,

and I am one of it's particles.

What is love?

What is death?

What is life?

This are the questions I wonder about.

I think time reveals a man to himself.

I think it brings out the demons and angels in us.

That's what it did to me.

I always thought I was normal, like all the the little princesses with fine dreams of marriage.

I forced my thoughts to be like theirs.

I forced myself to believe that what I needed was a perfect prince from a foreign country.

I forced my hope to be like theirs.

I forced myself to believe that I wanted my marriage to bring a powerful ally to my family.

I forced my desire to be like theirs.

I forced myself to believe that I needed to please my country to be happy with myself.

But deep down I was just a rebel, a selfish, horny and erratic rebel who wanted to break the rules.

Why do we follow the rules?

Why do we care about the rules?

I remember the first time I saw you take a man's life.

It was one of those dark nights.

When I would attempt to run away and change my mind halfway.

Why did you kill that man?

Out of anger? Stupid jealousy?

He was going to help us runaway?

But you killed him because he made me laugh.

Love is chaos.

Love is madness.

Love is desire.

Love perhaps is what you make of it.

I loved you because you were wild.

I desired you because you took me by force.

You broke through my insecurities.

You drove me to madness,

and you were going to take me to hell.

You were right about everything.

About who I am,

The things I've done,

The peasants who have died, the nobles who have bribed, the love we shared that died.

My monster, the man of my dreams,

the only man who could scare me and love me at the same time.

My intentions were never to hurt you, but I had to see the reality of what we were at one point or another.

I can't tell you to stop loving me.

I can't tell you I don't love you.

I can't hate you.

I can't kill you, but I don't want you.

Fire and ice define our worlds,

two separate worlds without a meeting point.

Your great strength cannot change that fact.

To our people your a criminal,

a strange man,

a reminder of our dark past,

the monster of the underground.

Think about this,

if I wasn't in the palace would you still be free man?

isn't the picture clear enough?

I love you enough to stay away from you.

THE DELIVERY BOY

I delivered the letter of the monster to my Queen

then I delivered his reply to her.

I am the delivery boy,

the middle man,

bearer of all secrets,

the unnoticed toad, but the closest thing the Queen has to a friend.

I was initially born a prince in my country.

But i was born blind.

So i was discarded as a curse.

No prince had ever been born blind,

so i became a beggar.

Due to my blindness my senses are very powerful.

So I could feel everything around me.

That was how I learned to fight.

And that was how I survived.

But this is not the story of the beggar who became a delivery boy to the most powerful Queen to ever exist.

It is the story of the beggar who brought the Queen her most powerful and deepest heart desire "LOVE."

Love is a mystery,

a game,

perhaps a dagger,

sometimes it's a trick,

a story,

perhaps a lie,

but above all things, I believe that love is a monster of pain.

How can something be so beautiful yet so painful?

How can something create so much joy and hurt?

How can love begin? Then why does it end?

I used to love once,

But my love is a useless story i tell myself.

The great love of my Queen is the story I tell to harmless idiots on the streets who no one will believe.

I met my Queen in a perilous situation

under a hidden identity.

Trying to enjoy the pleasure of common people

in a house filled with male prostitutes.

There was something about the wildness and naked men surrounding her that thrilled her.

She was half drunk when she approached me, and while dropping some money in my beggar pot she poured her vomit on me.

There was no apology for vomiting on me because she fainted right in front me, she was wasted.

Everyone knew about the night bandits in our country.

They were deadly criminals on wild horses that would strike at an unexpected moment, kill everyone and take everything.

The last thing you wished for when the night bandits struck was an unconscious drunk girl lying on the cold ground in front of you.

I contemplated my next move as a blind beggar with a survival instinct, the easy option was to leave her there to die, but I chose different.

I chose the hard option, I tried to save her.

I tried to wake her up, she woke up but she wasn't herself, so I put a hard slap on her right cheek and I pointed to the bandits.

We both ran for our lives, but I knew we could only escape death if mother luck was dancing on our heads.

We didn't have that luck, and we were surrounded in a few minutes.

My only option was to fight the bandits.

I've fought men before, countless times, mostly for money, never once did I fight killers, this was my first time and there was a difference.

When you fight someone as a normal person, taking a life is not an option, but this bandits were killers, taking my life was the first option.

They say mother luck is a gentle old woman with a bright smile and a sad face.

Watching over the living and laughing at their foolishness.

Once in a while she bestows her luck on those who may or may not deserve it. That night, mother luck sprinkled her luck on my life.

Perhaps mother luck really didn't care about me, but she cared about the Queen who was about to die after the bandits beat me half dead.

The royal army came out of nowhere with bows and arrows killing all the night bandits except those who escaped.

They were searching for the Queen as was required of them, but they could easily not have found us or they could have found her dead.

It was mother luck at her best.

Can you imagine a beggar who enters the palace with a smile on his face, wounds on his chest, a scar on his back, and a broken leg.

That was me.

From that night I remained in the palace serving my Queen, observing her words and reactions, until I noticed something.

There was a quiet sadness that fell on her when she was approached by rich suitors with different agendas whom she would always reject.

All her servants knew about it but no one dared to ask why.

When I was nothing but an ordinary man in the streets, I used to believe my fellow ordinary men when they would say the Queen does not have a heart.

But when I got close to the Queen I realized she had a heart as deep as a well and in this well, there were secrets, desires and thoughts.

I tried three times to approach my Queen for a conversation. I was unlucky. I ended up in prison three times.

I couldn't create a good excuse for the guards to let me see the Queen, so I climbed the walls into her room. I scared her.

I pleaded with her and explained my curiosity at her sadness which I had noticed.

Then she told me a secret.

That night, when the night bandits surrounded us, it wasn't the royal army that saved us.

It was someone else.

I couldn't believe it, but she reminded me I lost consciousness during my fight with the bandits.

While I was unconscious someone else appeared she told me, a man dressed up in iron armour with a large sword.

He killed the bandits and he gave the Queen some water from his jar to drink, then he took off his mask, looked into her eyes and walked away.

She called him her guardian angel, it wasn't the first time he was saving her she said.

Whenever he saved her he never stopped for a conversation she told me. She also told me he was handsome, muscular and scary.

I always wondered why she disappeared from the palace every once in a while to the annoyance of the ministers. It was because of him.

I knew what she wanted from me before she asked, and I was prepared to find him so I promised her.

I searched for this mystery man everywhere disguised as a beggar, and I found him.

There are times when I regret bringing the monster to my Queen, and there are times when I feel proud that i gave her happiness for a brief time.

THE MONSTER

Madness rages in my heart after reading your last letter.

If it were in the old days, I would strangle fifty men to quell my anger, but you have changed me.

In this anger all I can do is think about you as I write this letter.

I never told you this story, I once met a spirit known as Penelope the queen of seduction.

I call her a spirit because she could pull any man living in the streets or in a palace to her bed.

She was my friend.

I couldn't sleep with her. I told her she was a public spectacle.

She was a woman meant for men who were seeking a thrill not those who were seeking love and a special connection like me.

Every time we had an issue between us she was the one I discussed with.

She never knew you were the Queen until a certain day when she drugged me.

Penelope was obsessed with sex and wealth. The concept of love irritated her, and she could not resist the temptation of sleeping with me.

Unknowingly I gave her the opportunity to drug me by accepting a drink from her.

While I was out of my mind, she sucked my dick and made me fuck her like a mad man.

I was truly aware of everything I did under the influence of the drug but I couldn't stop myself.

Then she asked me about your identity and I told her everything about us. I gave her proof.

She told me she would sell the information of our relationship to the highest bidder among the noble men.

There was something similar between you and Penelope. You would be surprised.

She was the only woman I ever fucked who drained my energy like you.

You would wonder if she was truly my friend, if she truly cared, but I know she was my friend.

However, her loyalty was to greed.

She was born poor, sex was the only tool that got her a better life, but she wanted more.

If she sold our truth to the nobles she had a chance of becoming rich.

Can friendship ever be worth more than wealth? Maybe in another life it can.

When I killed her, I didn't hate her, I wasn't angry,

I just wanted to protect you.

I knew you wanted to keep us a secret, I understood. Yet I had to kill my only friend for you.

I understand why you would think you were protecting me by staying away from me.

But there's something you don't understand, our love is my life, I am dead without it.

Our love is forbidden,

is that something difficult for you to say?

But I don't care.

My own parents didn't want me to be born, my birth led to their respective deaths.

I am a forbidden child from a forbidden love affair.

I was born to live a forbidden life.

Do you know how it feels to know that you were hated from birth?

Do you know how it feels to know that no one, not one person wanted you?

You wouldn't understand such pain, you have always been wanted.

You have always been important, important to your family, important to society, important to the social order.

But there are beggars, handicaps, poverty stricken idiots, vagabonds and bastards like me who have been rejected at every door.

Our only hope is to burn in hell after committing atrocities.

Every society has people like me, but I am one of the lucky ones.

Because I found love.

For people like me, love is a rare gem, it is something we can only imagine.

Is it that easy for you to toss your desires aside?

Or do you feel wrong to have found love?

I will await your second reply in hope that you will accept the fact that I cannot give up on you.

Or I will die fighting for you.

THE QUEEN

When your a child, life doesn't seem serious.

You can smile and laugh and forget about it the next day.

You can hate and curse and never think twice about the cost.

But life is critical when you grow.

Decisions are weighty.

Actions and inactions can be tricky.

I was a child when I fell in love with you.

I was carried away with the fantasy of falling in love with a brave warrior who protects his people in secret.

I wanted to believe that the people loved you.

that you were there hero,

but they were afraid of you,

despite the fact you saved their lives countless times.

Maturity identifies the difference between reality and fantasy.

My father use to say maturity could only be found in the realization that reality was an enemy to happiness and a friend to sorrow.

Perhaps he was right.

I believed in your anger.

I believed that anger was the only thing that kept you alive when you fought thousands of men or monsters.

So I understood your fiery temper,

and your forceful love.

You question me if i can toss my desires aside so easily, i can toss them aside to protect you.

I do not feel wrong to have found love,

Just like you i feel lucky,

because just like you i was never meant to find it.

And i feel great pleasure in protecting the one i love.

I feel like you look down on me and my sacrifice.

I feel like you think it was easy for me to walk away from you.

Yet everyday i am drowning in my emotions,

but for the first time in my life i am confident i made the best choice.

You gave me a reason to take up my responsibility as Queen.

I hate the pressure of controlling people's lives, so many people have died from my mistakes, and i can't even say sorry to their families because I'm ashamed.

But when i think about the fact that i used my authority to save the life of the one i love,

i feel joy for a brief moment.

Do you forget that they were going to kill you?

That the nobles made the commoners blame you for the deaths they created in their own madness.

Do you forget that my sister died trying to protect our secret?

She was not buried, her name is a taboo in the country, everyone believes she slept with her sister, but we both know she didn't.

You have lost a friend, i have lost a brother.

You are right, i have always been important to my family, society and the social order.

Most people call it a privilege, yet only those of us involved can understand the burden in the lives of royalty.

As a Queen i had to learn the hard way that there is only one person you can truly trust and that is yourself.

Everyone around me who smiles and acts loyal desires a gift or a curse from the Queen, for their benefit.

Isn't there pain in losing trust in people?

I can't claim to have faced more difficulty than you, but I have felt pain, and in whatever form, it never feels good.

I wish everyone could see you for the beautiful wounded soul you are.

Rejected by your parents, becoming a warrior to protect your country when the government failed.

I was never worthy of your love.

Our love story has been an incredible journey, the stuff of legends.

If you break into the palace to take me away, it would be the end of our sad lives,

I can never face the embarrassment, but I know you will follow your heart, perhaps we can drink the poison I keep by my bed together,

Our lives have no meeting points on earth.

What if death is our only hope?

THE MONSTER

When i was a child, the only thought that gave me energy to live everyday was to become great.

To become someone.

This was the reason i became the monster, it wasn't to protect the people at first,

But much later when i understood the suffering of our people, i put on the mask of the monster with pride,

I had become someone people talked about.

I fought with anger and arrogance, the bastard who belonged to no one had found purpose.

Then it started slowly, I started killing citizens, rich men in our country, I killed them and it broke my heart.

This was the beginning of the end of my reputation.

I didn't hate the rich men when I took their souls to hell, it was the only option.

The only way to save the country.

Most of them were smuggling goods, trafficking poor people and opening the country to foreign invaders.

I kept killing them, i kept chasing them, doing my best to stop them, days turned into months, months into years.

Actions have consequences, it was only a matter of time before my enemies knew their enemy well enough to stop him.

My Queen, you are right, they framed me for their wrongs and they caught me, and if it weren't for you and your authority, i would be dead.

I ask myself, would i rather have died than live without you?

You were prepared to walk away from your life as Queen for me, but i allowed my anger to drive me to the edge.

If i had walked away from being the monster perhaps we would have made it.

I think there is part of me that wanted to achieve something,

I wanted to end the suffering.

If they all died, if they all they lost their wealth,

would the suffering end?

I wanted to believe so.

Sometimes a man wants to believe that the world will stand still while he moves.

Then suddenly he realizes that life thinks faster than his first thought.

After your last letter, I can't explain how I feel.

Anger or sadness does it really matter?

It could be, it could really be that our only choice to be together is death,

But isn't that a sad choice?

That our hearts have to placed on a sacrifial altar to satisfy the wishes of the masses,

shouldn't we try to be alive?

Shouldn't we try to find happiness outside our constraints in this life?

Should we allow the poison of society to destroy our souls?

Do you really believe death is a savior?

Isn't death just as uncertain as life?

Are you one those spirituals who believe in life after death or a second life?

Or do you choose to believe in fairytales because you have lost hope?

I do not trust death to bring us together,

and I have never been afraid of shame.

I killed rich men in this country to save the poor.

The men i killed caused the poverty and death of many.

But the saviour became the hated,

and the unjust became the just.

I played a game against their wealth and influence, and truthfully I lost.

But I won't lose you to them,

i won't fear the death and punishment that they have promised.

I won't think about the obstacles between me and you.

I won't see the destruction that awaits forbidden lovers.

I won't smell the anger of greedy idiots with no love for their people,

but i will only seek love.

THE DELIVERY BOY

The loyalty of a servant lies in his ability to defy all odds to please his master.

Each tear that streams down the cheek of my Queen makes me feel responsible.

You have to understand my intention as a servant to understand my intention for helping the monster into the palace.

You have to understand my intention as a servant to understand why I would willfully create chaos in the palace.

You have to understand my intention as a servant to understand why the delivery boy gave the Queen to her death.

A man's desire can be more deadly than weapons of warfare.

A Queen's desire will throw her kingdom into calamity.

A monster's desire will capture everyone around him and throw them into damnation.

What nature does my Queen possess to fall in love with the most hated man?

The most unlucky man,

The most unsuspecting, unrealistic man,

The most disastrous and foolishly strong man,

A man who was carved out of pain and anger,

A man of steel.

Oh what nature does my Queen possess?

This questions I asked myself.

It was bound to happen if I think about it.

The monster was searching for a way to break into the palace,

If it wasn't through me, it would have been through someone else or something else.

The people of our country called him a monster because he wore a mask.

But to me he was a monster because of his heart.

It would have been perfect, my plan was close to perfect.

I wanted to bring him into the palace to see the Queen just once and take him out quietly,

But when I told the the old man who works in the palace garden of my plan he said "lovers are like bush traps"

You will never understand the meaning of that statement just like I didn't,

However, you will appreciate the essence of the old man's wisdom,

In my own words what the old man wanted to say is "lovers will make you believe love is everything"

And they did.

The stars make me believe love is worth fighting for,

The rain makes me believe love is worth yearning for,

But the heat of the sun reminds me love is hard.

The monster approached me after I delivered the last letter.

He held me by my robe and threatened to bring death to my family if I didn't let him into the palace.

This was the lie I used to convince the palace maid to turn a blind eye.

I told the palace guards the Queen had deemed them worthy of royal honour,

It was not unusual for royal food to accompany royal honour,

And with that trick I fed a meal mixed with sleeping

pills to the guards,

I caused a fake fire in the horse stables to distract any spy planted by the nobles to watch the Queen.

And while the fire burned, the palace was shouting, and the monster was sneaking,

But really I was the one sneaking, he was walking like a champion,

I led him straight to the Queen's chambers,

I knew she would be happy to see him,

She would never admit it, but each day I could see how miserable she had become,

She was working hard, attending to important issues of the country, but she lacked the smile, the spark she had with him.

I wanted to return her happy spirit,

I wanted to her to feel alive again,

I wanted to her to tell me she was happy like she did the first time I brought him to her.

Because just as you might be guessing I wasn't just loyal to her, I was in love with her,

But I could never make her happy, not like him.

I was merely a delivery boy and my life had meaning because of her,

There was no world where she would see me as more than a servant, as a man like she saw him.

You might wonder if I read the letters she wrote and the letters he wrote.

Yes I did, I wanted to be aware of everything he said and did to her.

I knew when they had their first night of sexual pleasure.

I didn't just know, I watched them do it, peeping through the small hole I created in her wardrobe.

So yes I knew, that if I brought him to her, she could possibly decide to die with him.

It was the only reason she kept the poison by her bedside.

Did I think she was bold enough to attempt death?

I did,

Did I want her to die with him?

I can't say for sure, i only had my jealous moments,

But maybe intention cloaks itself in emotional shadows,

I wouldn't understand such deep things,

But I remember this, I led the monster to my Queen and I found her dead laying on his body.

He was dead as well, and they both seemed so peaceful.

I just stared at them,

I wasn't sad, I wasn't happy, I was jealous,

Jealous of the peace they found in a poison bottle.

What if there was a part of me that wanted this?

Does that make me a murderer?

The old man knew about my plan like I said before.

He exposed me to the nobles and I was arrested as the mastermind behind the Queen's death.

I was taken to the supreme judge.

That was the law.

I was told i had the chance to save myself if I told the truth.

Some people advised me to blame everything on the monster.

But i didn't really care.

I didn't care about saving my name or saving myself.

Instead i kept thinking what could i have done differently.

If i had killed the monster without the Queen knowing would she have felt better?

Perhaps i should have encouraged him to let go of his stupid, ridiculous love for her.

To search for another woman to fill his empty soul.

He probably would have found another woman whom he could actually be with.

If he had tried to forget about her.

If she had tried to forget about him.

They could possibly have lived.

Or maybe if she had been bold enough?

If she wasn't so ashamed of the man her heart cried out for.

But maybe if i wasn't such an incapable scoundrel,

i would never have tried to be the missing bridge between a monster and my Queen.

The old man once told me that the monster of emotions existed in the hearts of men and women who lost their sense of reasoning to allow their emotions spill out of control.

You could also say love is not to blame.

And human beings are just what we are.

We all make choices,

it is only fair we bear consequences.