Freaks

Behold the human tragedy of the discarded runway model--
This is not the cheap bathos of crying clowns, painted on velvet and sold to women named Madge at tawdry flea markets.
This is true waste, genuine suffering.

Do you think that high cheek bones are a guarantee of
Joy?
Adoration?
High-paying shoots in glamorous locales?

Listen--
They are a predictor of sorrow.
Consider this...
Being exceptionally beautiful places one outside of the norm just as surely as exceptional ugliness does.
Removed from one's fellows, one becomes
A perpetual foreigner,
A beautiful mote floating within one's own smooth skin,
Another panicked dot--albeit a gorgeous one--lost on the streets of an inner Tokyo,
And everyone around you
Is, in some manner, a hungry Godzilla.

Welcome to Beauty.
But wait. There's more.

No one cares about your soul, honey.
No one cares about your wa, your essence--
Stow that shit.

You are the blank screen upon which the visions and perversions of others are projected.
In London, Rome and Paris, you are nothing but virtual reality, a mecha dream girl,
A dumb donkey to haul the loads of otaku motherfuckers who can design this season's rage,
But cannot tie their own shoes or order a sandwich without desperately consulting their tablet--
That severe and tiny god.

The runway model is a brand ambassador for the Divine.
She is what we would be,
If we were not so twisted, so marred, so comically fucked up.
Why, then,
Is she reduced to shilling for overpriced underwear?
Why does she not destroy us all, an angry Athena not to be trifled with, confiding in her owl,
Leveling fools,
Bringing fire and flood?

Perhaps I overestimate the power of beauty
As I prowl the soup kitchens and freeway ramps for discarded angels,
Loading them into my dented van,
Adding them to my holy army.

I am the hideous crone at the head of a sexy shock wave--
Here we come, the Different Ones you never understood.
Kiss our asses and hand over the cameras;
It's our world now, and you shrunken Godzillas
only 
live in it.
_______

My sincere thanks to Flipside, who provided me a word list to work from, and to my co-worker Tanya H., who shared with me some of her impressions from having worked as a runway model.