We are only quiet monsters with soft, soft, singing voices. Sometimes the cold can penetrate us. We are neither wholly evil nor wholly good. Only quiet monsters together in the soft and silent dust.

If we fear each other, it is because we are afraid to look into our own eyes--afraid that if we chance a glance upon our kin, we will see our agony mirrored there inside. We kill each other gently and so welcome our own demise.

Are you surprised?

Monsters have no feelings but we feel, we feel ever so deeply when we close our monster eyes.

Monsters cannot love but we have hearts and souls that, within us, retreat and rise. Shall we hold out open hands, full of scars and grit and sand, and let you glower over our quiet sighs?

We are such quiet beasts. So, so quiet, so quiet that they cannot hear our cries.

But the light bends out upon us through a prism in the sky. The light bends out and floods our vision, awakens dark holes inside us where our spirits lay imprisoned. Are we whole? Are we hole? Do holy monsters with wings and feathers, somewhere in this vast gray world, do holy monsters spread their feathered wings and fly?

We are only quiet monsters with quiet voices, and silence where our souls should be. But monsters cannot love each other, not the way that you love me.

Do you love me, gentle monster? Do you see beauty through your dark liquid eyes?

(These battered claws that reach and tremble, timidly, these claws are beginning to look more and more like battered human hands)

Your soft soft voice is a whisper like the forests of my home. In the deep-set anguished brow I look up and see two gleaming tears emerge from their shadowy quarters. But monsters cannot cry...

Our personal hells, these putrid shells that house our feathered souls, we wish to break and break throughout. Our hands are battered from beating on cages that hold us in a bleak and furious mold. We are only quiet monsters, taking short and painful breaths in the silence and the cold. Do not cry out, dear one, this place is not our home, our world.

For one day we monsters, too, may spread our feathered wings and fly into the fragrant lovely night.