The Monster in the Closet

It is childish to see a monster in the closet
But that does not make it wrong
The little boy is right
To think that there are monsters

There are dragons on the winds
Who burn villages to the ground
Who kidnap fair maidens
Who amass for themselves piles
Of useless, glittering gold

There are goblins aplenty
Practical, grim-faced, grumbling things
Who are immune to all beauty
Who are deaf to all pleas
They have built sweat shops
They have ruled the slums
As firmly as they have ruled legislatures
And there is not one among them
Who would not kill their king to steal his crown
But they are practical creatures
So they have comradeship without friendship
And laws without loyalty
For they love to crush bones and steal gold
And they can do these things more easily
When they are in an army

There are giants roaming about
They take treasures like the others
But they love not luxury
They love only power
They eat men and women
Not because of any taste
But for the sake of power
To subjugate an unfathomable soul
To reduce it to a mere meal
To prove their superiority
There are ubermensch at large
And their strength is their only love

There are hags and ogres
Isolated fiends without treasures
With relatively meager strength
Filled with bitterness
Steeped in sweet misery
Full of the sickly pleasures
Of resentment and revenge

And there are subtler things
Creatures that whisper in the dark
That lure travelers off of cliffs
Monsters that poke with venomous claws
At natural pleasures and delights
Until those things become inflamed
Until they grow huge and misshapen
Until they develop into obsession and addiction

You will say that the monster is not in the closet
It is in you and in me
It is in an office or patrolling a street
But you are missing something
I do not have a monster
I am monstrous
And the thing in the closet
Is something other
As the people in offices are not

The monster in the closet
Is a thing without love
It is with the sweat shop owner
But it is not him
It is in the winds
It is an implacable fiend
It is not instinct or tendency
But it does exploit those things
It organizes them
It builds a machine from them
An interplay of egos
In which it makes its home

And there is another thing to note
It is in the child's closet
Because it hates the child
We have known so since Moloch
It does not just feed on weakness and innocence
It hates them
It sees them and it seethes with rage
And it is also afraid
It remembers Jack
The weak have often killed the strong
And the plans of grim practicality
Have been wrecked by stupid, cheerful innocence

But it is in the closet
Because there is something else
Some other implacable thing
Something killed a thousand times over
Which each time refuses to remain in the grave
The monster hides in the closet
It builds a camouflage of decency
A barricade of rationales
And plays every magic trick it can
To make everyone look the other way
Because it is not safe in the light of day

So do not be surprised
When the monster comes
And offers anything you wish for
In exchange for the meager price
Of someone else's firstborn child