The Monster In The Margin

I come from a world

where culture is measured in literature and cinema,

and ambition is measured in the rung you die on

in the corporate ladder of salaried slavery.

A world that calls itself humble

because arrogance is a luxury

the middle class cannot afford

unless it’s borrowed from fiction.

A world where your stories —

your history, your literature, your cinema,

repeat the same convenient lies

until they fossilise in the marrow

and parade as truth.

They give you heroes and villains,

each dressed differently but built the same:

a hero wronged by the world,

never not naive enough to not sell his spine,

clutching rigid ideas of integrity

like second-hand moral hand-me-downs

from your sanctimonious neighbour.

But the villains, 

they get the nuance, the hunger, the musculature of motive.

They bleed redder, burn brighter,

and come in plurals

because the secret to culture and civilisation is:

the road to being a hero is always singular,

but there are a hundred ways

to be human enough to be called a villain.

Growing up, I wondered

why villains felt closer to my skin,

as if their shadows were stitched

into the lining of my own.

Why the heroes I was meant to worship

felt nauseating, perfumed,

plastic gods of plastic virtues.

I know now.

People love heroes

because their lives demand delusion;

hope curated, pain censored,

mediocrity disguised as destiny.

People despise villains

because villains are carved

from the same flesh and flaw

people scrape off their reflections.

Villains are the parts we exile,

the truths we smother,

the selves we bury alive

under inherited righteousness.

If only we learnt

to live inside our own skins:

skins that itch, bruise, contradict,

skins that still carry the mess

we pretend we outgrew, 

maybe we wouldn’t slaughter entire lives

just to inhabit half-baked imaginations.

Maybe then, we wouldn’t need to worship heroes.

Because the real tragedy isn’t that villains exist;

it’s that we birthed them

from everything we were too cowardly

to forgive in ourselves. 

So we buried them in thick pages of thin fiction

and called the corpse “culture.”