 Ready or not, you can't hide that identity is like a weapon of mass destruction. He spent years trying to find himself with no success. I'm gonna find you and take it. The veils and the sandstorms left him confused, so he lost himself under the bulletproof. Ready or not, here I come. I am a monster. Borrowed skinned limbs on loan from the cemetery. I've always been too proud to beg for beauty, so some people say that I am a natural and others say that I am unlovable. And everyone is right. In his 2007 book, Monsters Among Us, American author Rad Steiger writes, Bigfoot, sea monsters, werewolves, and the like may be quasi-real creatures that are manufactured by the human collective unconscious. What Steiger doesn't examine is where our fascination with searching for mythical monsters obscures an examination of the monster's conditions, behaviors, and realities around us. Monsters may fleetingly live in our imaginations, but they most often and too often live in the human conditions of abuse, hatred, war, and pestilence. Using Ready or Not by the Fugees, the 11th hour, a season of Crash and Burn by Lisi Harris, more or less one of the populace by Joshua Bennett, Birmingham by Jasmine Manns, and Monster by Adam Alexander, a program where we turn off our nightlights and shine a spotlight on the real human monsters that are not hard at all to find. Backpacks, nuclear bombs, got skylines, torn backflips, fighter jet engines, high-tech paintbrushes by my name across the horizon. Say my name again, and I'll show you what I'm good for. Wallets for the corpses, sandbox for several bones, color folks down on both sides, come to camouflage, and I'll recognize each other's faces. Whoo! I am ballin'! Dollar bills are the only things that can hide in the bodies, too. But next time, they'll hold it and have my money! I said the bomb wasn't meant for me. I think it was meant for past the bomb, as we'd be having no dreams. I think those white men didn't know that with the black girls we'd be going to church, too. Folding their hands, praying and taking communion, just like their daughters. Maybe if I wore my shirts, she's the bad man, but it never came. I don't think they match my dress, but they always just be heard in my feet. He protected it. No longer belong to the American dream, now a check out at the local supermarket. Each can of candles is an IED. He doesn't really understand what it means, because his military speaks and knows if he's in for a detention, but everyone looks at him like he's some sort of freak. But that thing right there killed two of his pump-mated commanding officers. Now he's standing in a parking lot threatening a customer with a janitor's mouth instead of car keys. I, Leonor, the Uncle Sam, and her doctor. Well, actually, a pharmaceutical CEO writes his white mustache, Pashikano, mom, and car corner stores. A play, good life, as you know it. Time's a lot, so take the candy from my hand, the first one's always free. Lord knows he's not doing the good stuff. God, my friend, is the angel's test. And me? Well, I am a monster, and I saw the playground with crack rocks. So playing with the same thing. The pills they keep giving him are just technical explosions going off in this gut, and I swear it's trying to re-engaging this program. But his brain's already on autopilot, and the rocket's already engaged. Oh! Everybody's going down straight up. No other way to describe it. I mean, I make my hatred off him with a license. So consider the impersonal treatment. There are you for judgment. Mama said that, that some sacrifice just comes without permission. That some sacrifice just comes without that warning. That some death just be labeled to black or to white to be labeled holy. That some church might just be swimming in baptismal pools. And some servants just be screaming, America's dirty little seeker. That God can't always protect you from the boogie man so, so some baby girls will reach the prayer gates that you don't get all enough to reach the handle. When I was young, a madman's loved me so much that he broke me to a chair that they could know it after. Just what my insides were caught in and in my skin for burlap. I guess you could say our relationship was violent, but it wasn't, you see? See, a little girl throwing flowers into the water taught him that beautiful things belong to the ocean button. But the current froze from disgusting. And all I wanted was an embrace that could warm me and an air that could listen. He told me I was crazy because I'd shown him the darkest parts of my life, only thinking that his smile would make him right. Mama said that some men will be too guilty to claim innocence with crimes. What did I do? I wanted to play with the white girls. I had my eyes for integration. All I wanted was a pair of homeless kids or maybe even an extra piece of cake at dinner time to speak thinking. And maybe God was too busy trying to protect my... I'm now standing here like this on a madman's table, waiting for a string to light me little kisses to bring me back to life. And I will utter these last few words, but I'll see them. Someone, please, make me human again. I'm Alpha Squadron Battalion 6. Knows are the only words he can say when his wife asks if he still loves me. He stops in his wife's arms and tells her that all he wants to do is go back. He felt more comfortable with dead bodies in Iraq. He sleeps in his own basement for fear that he'll strangle his own children. Poach dramatic stress disorder is a rabid mystery made obsolete in a society that wants him to fight but all he now wants is peace. So the pitter-patter of his two-year-old's feet his enemy gunfire into the left. Crayons on the page is this the scratching of torture instruments. So when his son asks him about the colors all he can think of is the blood.