Pop Mythology Pop Mythology: Movie, Book, Comic reviews & commentary
Editor’s note: I recently attended a spoken word performance by my friend and Pop Mythology contributor Jess Kroll. I loved his piece, “This Little Light,” so much, and thought that it resonated with the themes of this site so well, that I asked him to post it here. I’ve added pictures with his permission to make the thematic connection with the site more obvious. I hope that rather than cheapen the beauty of the piece with overly literal images, they further elucidate that heroic mythology is itself symbolic and that it simply represents the bringing forth of inner virtues. —The Pop Mythologist
Picture me yellow A spark among the timber A floating ember Igniting but never burning In the night I am the ambience For your favorite faerie stories
Picture me blue Wading through the pitch dark Where even the sun is afraid to show its face A single lit lure evolved for creatures To live and die With no light to depend on But their own
Picture me red In the face This is my way of getting your attention This is my method of both attraction and defense Like poets using words When bodies fail them You would think I’d have learned by now How to tell one pursuer from another
Picture me green Picture me purple and pearlescent and gold Among trees and sea and soil This is how life learned to shine How life takes its spotlight This is how the creatures of this world Adapt to make their existence Brighter More colorful Where the creation takes control of its own fortune Like, “Light is good and all but you know what, We got this.” We make for ourselves So when the world seems its darkest We become the light at the end of the tunnel
Picture me painter Smearing handfuls of desperation Upon floor canvases Making mountains of molded colors Into images never half as abstract As the lines of stock dividends Scratching and clawing at a flat surface For the illusion of depth and motion and meaning This is my last expression of primal action To a world which no longer allows it
Picture me musician Sitting solitary in a muted apartment Roaming invisible landscapes Rich rolling crescendos of temple bells and footfalls Headphones and laptop Red means too loud Green means not loud enough So I make music like Christmas lights Outside I am, collar and tie Middle management myrmidon Inside, I am rock god All bass, brass and brilliance Bottled into silence
Picture me writer Searching for the single word Which best describes the meteoric fall of hubris I prefer the company of the mind To that of the world And I’ll spend 5,000 words Following the path of a raindrop Down a pane of stained glass But never have one word to spare on you Because you refuse to read between the lines
We are trying To bring some color into this world As fleeting and futile as it may be A dim bulb in the skyline A single spark in the starless night A lone, faint blue dot one thousand meters beneath the surf Sometimes, The only way to survive Is to do everything you can To shine
If life is nothing more than a mad rush to make a better version of yourself And there is no light at the end of the tunnel Then the best thing we can do Is evolve
Picture me firefly Anglerfish Glow worm Picture me shining Picture yourselves shining Picture yourselves blue and red and green and purple Picture yourselves luminescent In rainbow hues That make the mantis shrimp squint There is more to survival than breathing The piles of paint hanging on gallery walls The rhythmic metallic snare kicks The gaps between words
And if you ever see yourself Dulling in the spotlight Drowning in the dark With no points in an opaque void And gravity coming to pull you in Become your own North Star The center of the constellations And look
It makes a pretty picture, doesn’t it? This life Will push you into plenty of dark tunnels This light Is up to you
