I want to be your creature.
Not your wife or your girlfriend
or your lover or your slave or your whore.
All those things are traps.
Something made by someone else.
A mold to fit into,
pattern to conform to,
role I learn the lines for,
play the part of.
but
If I’m your creature,
then I can be all those things,
or none of them.
I can put on those masks
or take them off at will.
If I’m your creature,
I can be whatever it is
you need me to be at that moment,
and not in the next.
The fluid dynamics of persona.
Interesting thought. Lovely poem.
I always felt that calling a woman a creature was slightly demeaning in some way. She’s not a woman, she’s not a person with thoughts and feelings I can relate to but some kind of beautiful creature that is alien to me somehow.
Of couse that could be just the way my warped little
mind works so it might be best to just ignore me
Oh no! I think you’ve hit the nail, semiotically speaking, on the head. Except for the beautiful part. I guess my point is – who defines what a ‘woman’ is? You? Me? No. It is a thing defined by social and historical consensus. So exactly who do you trust to tell you what you are? Because at the moment, the people defining us not only don’t love us, but actively USE us as fodder. Frankly, my thought on this was the idea of placing in the hands of someone who loves you, that task instead. I’m really playing with the concept of identity and who defines it.
This has me thinking: Love is about trusting someone with your identity–trusting them to protect what you reveal, and in some sense trusting them to create you, uniquely, without taking the easy but destructive way of molds, patterns, roles.
You have expressed that perfectly, City.
Ages ago I left the following on a dorm room door of a girl I was dating at the time. It’s about gender rather then identity but it’s along the same lines of thought.
The concept of gender is poor idea created by a lousy writer with little imagination…
I had a boyfriend who use to call me his little creature in the most adoring way.
It was in the context of my first sexual adventures. It allowed freedom to create whatever we wanted. That was a good space.
I have always (as long as I can remember, anyway) thought of myself as ‘creature’ and adored any who applied the word to me. It wasn’t ‘girl’ or ‘boy’ or ‘weird thing’ or ‘teenager’ or ‘young person’ or ‘human’ or ANYTHING I didn’t want, it only covered the basics: alive, and functionally mammal. It was perfect for me, and still is.
I do that too, until not that long ago I was perfectly defined and had my niche… But now I feel as if I have turned in to a creature… creature of desires