Before the public learned of the crime he ended up infamous for, he was known to form any animal from origami paper.
A mostly-kind brother. A long distance runner, a wizard of electrical repair. Owner of a pickup truck who actually showed up when tree-hugging small-car friends moved house on short notice. The name’s now a synonym for monstrously unsavory behavior. It used to be simply another name.
Years before a victim got away alive and called the FBI, it’s fair to note that he was skilled with a potter’s wheel. He’s irredeemable, but he made his mother rock with laughter when she was sick from chemotherapy. He built her kitchen cabinets out of bird’s-eye maple the same summer he began digging out the underground chambers.
He roughed in a wall between the normal mind and the malevolence. At first perhaps he didn’t breach that wall. Later, of course, restraint failed completely. Before he was a bogeyman, even while he was one, he was always nimble with his hands.
Categories: Confession, Poetry, Themed
Tags: Bifurcation, e-zine, ezine, hyperbole, longing, melancholy, melancholy hyperbole, new, poem, poet, poetry, poets, submit, Todd Mercer, writing
Melancholy Hyperbole 
I’m always fascinated with human duality. None of us are all of what we seem. Bifurcation embodies this immutable fact in clean beautiful prose.