• You are not just a manufacturing error,
    he was told.
    You are more than the sum of your parts.
    Though by nature melancholy
    and inherently frail,
    the imp grew.

    A hangdog look
    and a bleary-eyed gaze
    belied the potential of sinew, marrow,
    flesh, and bone.
    From an ovoid monochrome,
    his cells shifted and differentiated -
    buds became limbs;
    his will rendered the spindly tail vestigial
    and then nonexistent;
    and then
    he was a boy,

    albeit pallid and sickly,
    crippled and languid.
    But from that liminal state,
    he exerted all the strength of his vitriol,
    brewed in anguish and steeped in sorrow,
    he forsook the malaise of youth
    for the fervor of manhood,
    and in high dudgeon he flies,
    malice on the wing.