Black and White

A Poem by Krayg

This piece reflects some of the difficulties of growing up and coming of age especially in terms of discovering who you are.

White is the studious boy with the black rimmed glasses who sits quietly in class seemingly entranced by the intellectual stimulation of the professor’s words but is actually absorbed in a daydream. He dreams in black drippings of power, prestige, and passion. No one knows. No one will bother learning and he will not allow them to see. On the surface, he is as calm as a crystalline lake in the sun during a warm day in the spring’s infancy. Perhaps he is too calm. He is rigid and calculating even by those who should know him better. His nature conceals the black wave tsunami ravaging the darkest crevices of his mangled heart. Beneath the gentleman is the savage beast kicking and screaming and punching and scratching wildly and blindly in the solitude of his rage. Years of repressed abuse have left him with an undying angst bred from sorrow and fear. It has also left with him with a cynical ability to calmly enjoy the hell he creates. This is where the earthquake created a schism of identity boring two young men out of one.

The boy in white is the one who fears everything. He desires companionship but is unable to receive it because he is not actually a person, but a mirror to those around him. He consumes their thoughts, preferences, and opinions and reveals the best aspects of the person gazing into him. The problem is he is inanimate and has no true connection to the people he interacts with. When they are finished with him, they leave but he remains stationed in internal grievance and desolation with nothing more than the mere memory of the illusion of friendship. When the pain of nothingness is too much to bear, he retreats into the womb of his mother and to an innocence and childishness unsuitable for a young gentleman his age. White’s weakness is a purity of heart. Human tragedy seeps into his heart and withers his soul. He experiences the pain of others as if it is his own. He cannot turn a blind eye to the beggar who sits back against the fence gazing into the street at the life he has thrown away. White wants more than to help the man. He wants to understand how one ends up like this and whether or not he is following the man’s footsteps. Of course white will never be left physically wanting for as long as he has his intellectual agencies and drive to work hard. White’s fear is his heart will be left empty, barren, and unbound. Yet White’s heart is so fragile he cannot open it out of fear his affections will not be reciprocated. People like White but cannot love him because White has no substance. He is colored by those around him but leave him alone, and there is nothing there except a blank canvas.

The boy in black grew out of white’s misery. He is the explosive rush of black water bursting from the dam which confines him. He swallows everything in his path because he believes he is entitled to anything he wishes to seize. He suffered a youth of hardship and believes he deserves everything he wants now. Anyone who challenges him is icily dismissed as an unworthy adversary. He does not respect the rules because the people who instituted them are moronic compared to him. His anger is reserved to himself, and those around him are fortunate because years of repressed hostility has endowed him with a boiling angst hotter than Krakatoa whose limits reach to the farthest corners of the solar system. He is the bewildered animal who claws at his victim with the determination to kill. Only the person he is attacking is the person he loves the most: himself. Black experiences a self-hatred stronger than White’s self-pity because in his mind, the people who are better than him, the people he can never live up to be dance in his head every minute of every hour of every day. Manipulating and destroying others are cathartic sport for him whenever he is not enough to hate. He likes people as White does, but whereas white is an object, the people in Black’s life are toys to be played with and controlled. Black can do this with ease because he has White’s mask and is so skilled that by the time the damaged is done no one notices Black was the one who instigated it. White does the hard work but it is Black’s freedom of thought and action combined with his impulsivity which leads to brilliance. White is discipline where Black is passion and art. Ironically people enjoy Black more because there is a brusque charm in Black’s vulgarity and criticism.

The young men in gray stares at his reflection in the colorless water asking the question he may never know the answer to. “Who am I?”