Sunnydale-Side Up (BtVS Prose Poem--rated PG)
I'm posting this poem here because Alliterator asked to see it. It's the only thing I managed to come up with for the Halloween BtVS/AtS Lyric Wheel. Basically, it's just Buffy, musing about Halloween, Sunnydale and her life.
Disclaimer: This world belongs to Joss Whedon, Mutant Enemy Enterprises, Kuzui Enterprises and Sandollar Television. I'm not making any money from this--I'm just playing in their universe for a while.
***
Halloween.
Not my favorite day.
Dawn likes it.
She talks of masquerade parties and games,
Harmless conjurings by people
Who know nothing of real magic--
Unlike...well, everyone we know.
She doesn't talk about the other side of Halloween,
The dark side,
The Sunnydale side,
The side that turns everything Sunnydale-side up.
I try to ignore Halloween these days,
Try to forget the time I dreamed
That I was dead and became a vampire
Who had to dig her way out of her grave.
This was before I died. Before either death.
(Thank you SO much, Willow,
For making part of that nightmare come true.)
I don't speak of
The time I lost myself to a costume:
An eighteenth-century noblewoman
Straight from the cover of a romance novel,
All prettiness and frills, and no backbone.
No me,
Except the fragment of me still awake,
Still aware,
Staring out of a stranger's vapidly beautiful eyes,
Seeing the danger my friends were in,
Unable to fight, to struggle, to do anything but simper,
"How wonderful you men are!"
I really hated that.
And the frat house Halloween party we got trapped at--
The one where a fear demon held everyone prisoner
And fed off of our emotions.
It was worse than a vampire, in a way.
A vampire only feeds off of blood, not your self...
Unless the vampire is into
Torture, domination, thrall.
It's amazing how much strange stuff occurs
On a day
When the forces of evil are, supposedly,
Kicking back and taking the night off.
Still...bizarre things happen on Halloween.
Strange things happen in every city,
Every state,
Every country.
That's Halloween.
It's how things are.
The general weirdness isn't the problem.
The problem is, Sunnydale's Halloween never ends.
I can't walk through a park (or a cemetery)
Without getting jumped by two or three vampires--
Maybe garden-variety, maybe the Neanderthal sort.
Turok-Hans, Giles calls those.
Dawn calls them orcs.
She swears director Peter Jackson ran into a couple, once.
She might be right.
We won't even talk about the Stepford 'droids--
April and the Buffybot--
Or Ted Buchanan,
The homicidal robot who dated my mom,
Or Moloch, Willow's Internet boyfriend
Who turned out to be both robot and demon.
I've gone to school with boys turned zombie,
With kids possessed by hyena spirits.
(And we won't mention
That the possessed kids ate the principal,
Or that one of the possessed tried to hurt me, rape me,
Or that I'm still friends with the boy who tried that...
Because it wasn't his fault, or his will.
It was the hyena spirit.
I have to believe that.)
I remember my school's championship swim team
Turning into squamous, batachrian fish-monsters
Straight out of H.P. Lovecraft.
I don't know what Lovecraft meant by squamous or batachrian
But all I have to do is think back to the boys--
Who were jerks and idiots,
And even now I can't con myself into believing
That I ever liked them--
And then I think about their human skin splitting open
To reveal a scaly reptilian horror beneath,
And I wonder
If some scrap of the human survived in the monster,
If they knew what had happened,
And this was forever for them.
And then I shudder, feeling what squamous means,
Even if I don't actually know.
My mom,
Who I know loved me,
And loved me deeply,
Once fell under the control of a demon
And incited a mob to burn me at the stake.
My male best friend--
One of the guys who was possessed by a hyena and ate the principal--
Dated a transfer student
Who looked very good for an Incan mummy,
Fell in lust with a substitute teacher
Who was a praying mantis,
Almost married Anya,
Sometime vengeance demon...
Oh, and I can't forget Cordelia,
The rich girl-cheerleader-princess with an acid tongue.
Cordelia was what convinced me that Xander attracts demons.
Must be pheromones or something.
My female best friend is a witch.
She had one lover who was a witch
And who grew up thinking she was a demon,
And another lover who was a werewolf.
Kind of a quiet, laid-back werewolf.
He was into guitar playing and Zen Buddhism.
My librarian-Watcher-mentor used to summon demons
When he was young.
Not now. Why summon demons on the Hellmouth?
He says that's coals to...
Well, to someplace that has a lot of coal.
And me.
Slayer. Chosen One.
I've been dead twice.
Between the first death and the second,
I went to Hell,
Fought to save those held prisoner.
Kind of fitting,
Since I sent my first boyfriend to Hell.
We had sex.
He lost his soul.
He tried to destroy the world.
Talk about your messy breakups.
I've dated two vampires--
Though dating may not be the right word--
Plus a nice normal teaching assistant
Who, it turned out, was a soldier
Working for an elite strike force
That captured demons
And studied them
And experimented on them.
Experimented on their own, too,
Augmenting bones and organs, blood and brain,
Controlling minds and emotions,
And transforming the best into zombies
Or pod people,
Who would do exactly as they were told.
The perfect soldiers.
My Psych 101 professor
Helped run the strike force
And created a human-demon-cyborg mix.
She read Frankenstein
And thought it was an instruction manual.
I've met Dracula, too.
Gotta say, the movies were better.
I've got a sister I love dearly
Even though she is, or used to be,
The Key to the destruction of the universe.
I've got memories of growing up with her
That aren't mine,
Were never mine,
And I curse and damn the monks who made my sister,
For meddling with my mind,
For making me forever unsure
What's real,
What isn't,
What's the difference.
You can get lost in unreality.
Sometimes I'd like to.
Sometimes I wish I were back in the asylum,
That all the vampires
And ghosts
And witches
And demons
Were all just stories,
That magic
Was something that existed
In fantasy novels or
In fantasy movies,
That trickery by David Copperfield
Or by Siegfried and Roy
Was the only magic there is.
I wish I were the crazy one,
And not the world.
They don't understand, none of them.
Not my sister, not my friends,
Certainly not the Potentials.
They think it's cool, exciting, important.
They don't realize--
None of them realize--
That for me, this is a horror movie
That never stops.
The monsters are never defeated.
I'm always the Slayer,
Always onstage.
I can't escape.
I tried that once.
Ended up fighting demons in L.A.
Even Heaven isn't far enough away;
I was there,
And I was ripped out of it,
Forcibly evicted,
Kicked out,
Cast out,
Back to killing monsters,
Back to trying not to be one.
Me and Jamie Lee Curtis--
Stuck battling the same demons
Forever.
I'm tired of monsters and vampires and demons,
Of prophetic dreams and preternatural curses.
I'm tired of death. I'm tired to death.
I want to look at the world
And not see something I have to fight.
I want a life
Without crosses and stakes,
Without the need to kill
Unliving neighbors,
Undead friends.
I want the horror movie to end,
The last reel to run,
The lights to come up.
I want to applaud and cheer,
And then I want to go home
To a world
Without vampires
Or demons
Or hellgods
Or Hellmouths.
Hell broke out on this Friday night.
Just another crisis,
Another battle with evil.
We won. Kind of.
Now the others are sitting in the living room,
Joking and laughing nervously,
Pretending they weren't stressed
Or scared.
I stare out the window
And wish
With all my might
For the horror movie to finish,
For Halloween to end at last.
I'm tired of being Chosen.
I want a life that isn't Sunnydale-side up.
Disclaimer: This world belongs to Joss Whedon, Mutant Enemy Enterprises, Kuzui Enterprises and Sandollar Television. I'm not making any money from this--I'm just playing in their universe for a while.
***
Halloween.
Not my favorite day.
Dawn likes it.
She talks of masquerade parties and games,
Harmless conjurings by people
Who know nothing of real magic--
Unlike...well, everyone we know.
She doesn't talk about the other side of Halloween,
The dark side,
The Sunnydale side,
The side that turns everything Sunnydale-side up.
I try to ignore Halloween these days,
Try to forget the time I dreamed
That I was dead and became a vampire
Who had to dig her way out of her grave.
This was before I died. Before either death.
(Thank you SO much, Willow,
For making part of that nightmare come true.)
I don't speak of
The time I lost myself to a costume:
An eighteenth-century noblewoman
Straight from the cover of a romance novel,
All prettiness and frills, and no backbone.
No me,
Except the fragment of me still awake,
Still aware,
Staring out of a stranger's vapidly beautiful eyes,
Seeing the danger my friends were in,
Unable to fight, to struggle, to do anything but simper,
"How wonderful you men are!"
I really hated that.
And the frat house Halloween party we got trapped at--
The one where a fear demon held everyone prisoner
And fed off of our emotions.
It was worse than a vampire, in a way.
A vampire only feeds off of blood, not your self...
Unless the vampire is into
Torture, domination, thrall.
It's amazing how much strange stuff occurs
On a day
When the forces of evil are, supposedly,
Kicking back and taking the night off.
Still...bizarre things happen on Halloween.
Strange things happen in every city,
Every state,
Every country.
That's Halloween.
It's how things are.
The general weirdness isn't the problem.
The problem is, Sunnydale's Halloween never ends.
I can't walk through a park (or a cemetery)
Without getting jumped by two or three vampires--
Maybe garden-variety, maybe the Neanderthal sort.
Turok-Hans, Giles calls those.
Dawn calls them orcs.
She swears director Peter Jackson ran into a couple, once.
She might be right.
We won't even talk about the Stepford 'droids--
April and the Buffybot--
Or Ted Buchanan,
The homicidal robot who dated my mom,
Or Moloch, Willow's Internet boyfriend
Who turned out to be both robot and demon.
I've gone to school with boys turned zombie,
With kids possessed by hyena spirits.
(And we won't mention
That the possessed kids ate the principal,
Or that one of the possessed tried to hurt me, rape me,
Or that I'm still friends with the boy who tried that...
Because it wasn't his fault, or his will.
It was the hyena spirit.
I have to believe that.)
I remember my school's championship swim team
Turning into squamous, batachrian fish-monsters
Straight out of H.P. Lovecraft.
I don't know what Lovecraft meant by squamous or batachrian
But all I have to do is think back to the boys--
Who were jerks and idiots,
And even now I can't con myself into believing
That I ever liked them--
And then I think about their human skin splitting open
To reveal a scaly reptilian horror beneath,
And I wonder
If some scrap of the human survived in the monster,
If they knew what had happened,
And this was forever for them.
And then I shudder, feeling what squamous means,
Even if I don't actually know.
My mom,
Who I know loved me,
And loved me deeply,
Once fell under the control of a demon
And incited a mob to burn me at the stake.
My male best friend--
One of the guys who was possessed by a hyena and ate the principal--
Dated a transfer student
Who looked very good for an Incan mummy,
Fell in lust with a substitute teacher
Who was a praying mantis,
Almost married Anya,
Sometime vengeance demon...
Oh, and I can't forget Cordelia,
The rich girl-cheerleader-princess with an acid tongue.
Cordelia was what convinced me that Xander attracts demons.
Must be pheromones or something.
My female best friend is a witch.
She had one lover who was a witch
And who grew up thinking she was a demon,
And another lover who was a werewolf.
Kind of a quiet, laid-back werewolf.
He was into guitar playing and Zen Buddhism.
My librarian-Watcher-mentor used to summon demons
When he was young.
Not now. Why summon demons on the Hellmouth?
He says that's coals to...
Well, to someplace that has a lot of coal.
And me.
Slayer. Chosen One.
I've been dead twice.
Between the first death and the second,
I went to Hell,
Fought to save those held prisoner.
Kind of fitting,
Since I sent my first boyfriend to Hell.
We had sex.
He lost his soul.
He tried to destroy the world.
Talk about your messy breakups.
I've dated two vampires--
Though dating may not be the right word--
Plus a nice normal teaching assistant
Who, it turned out, was a soldier
Working for an elite strike force
That captured demons
And studied them
And experimented on them.
Experimented on their own, too,
Augmenting bones and organs, blood and brain,
Controlling minds and emotions,
And transforming the best into zombies
Or pod people,
Who would do exactly as they were told.
The perfect soldiers.
My Psych 101 professor
Helped run the strike force
And created a human-demon-cyborg mix.
She read Frankenstein
And thought it was an instruction manual.
I've met Dracula, too.
Gotta say, the movies were better.
I've got a sister I love dearly
Even though she is, or used to be,
The Key to the destruction of the universe.
I've got memories of growing up with her
That aren't mine,
Were never mine,
And I curse and damn the monks who made my sister,
For meddling with my mind,
For making me forever unsure
What's real,
What isn't,
What's the difference.
You can get lost in unreality.
Sometimes I'd like to.
Sometimes I wish I were back in the asylum,
That all the vampires
And ghosts
And witches
And demons
Were all just stories,
That magic
Was something that existed
In fantasy novels or
In fantasy movies,
That trickery by David Copperfield
Or by Siegfried and Roy
Was the only magic there is.
I wish I were the crazy one,
And not the world.
They don't understand, none of them.
Not my sister, not my friends,
Certainly not the Potentials.
They think it's cool, exciting, important.
They don't realize--
None of them realize--
That for me, this is a horror movie
That never stops.
The monsters are never defeated.
I'm always the Slayer,
Always onstage.
I can't escape.
I tried that once.
Ended up fighting demons in L.A.
Even Heaven isn't far enough away;
I was there,
And I was ripped out of it,
Forcibly evicted,
Kicked out,
Cast out,
Back to killing monsters,
Back to trying not to be one.
Me and Jamie Lee Curtis--
Stuck battling the same demons
Forever.
I'm tired of monsters and vampires and demons,
Of prophetic dreams and preternatural curses.
I'm tired of death. I'm tired to death.
I want to look at the world
And not see something I have to fight.
I want a life
Without crosses and stakes,
Without the need to kill
Unliving neighbors,
Undead friends.
I want the horror movie to end,
The last reel to run,
The lights to come up.
I want to applaud and cheer,
And then I want to go home
To a world
Without vampires
Or demons
Or hellgods
Or Hellmouths.
Hell broke out on this Friday night.
Just another crisis,
Another battle with evil.
We won. Kind of.
Now the others are sitting in the living room,
Joking and laughing nervously,
Pretending they weren't stressed
Or scared.
I stare out the window
And wish
With all my might
For the horror movie to finish,
For Halloween to end at last.
I'm tired of being Chosen.
I want a life that isn't Sunnydale-side up.