The Mythical Hero of Legend has Clinical Depression

Oscar W Isaacs

The prophecy breathed of him cleaving through demons.

Reaping through legions of unspeakable evil. Reaming to pieces

their grievous leaders. Then of the deceased, he’d retrieve them

from Elysium by redeeming their lethal lesions.

A kill he’s healed…

But in reality, the Hero just sleeps in. His steed, he forgot to feed it.

Lives off cheap mead, cheap weed, gets a quest- he doesn’t even read it.

His sword forged by dwarves in the depths of a Fjord

is buried under heaps of laundry increasing week by week

because folding his jeans is as steep an Odyssey as deceiving Polyphemus.

Forget polishing those greaves when Aeneids

could be written from him polishing his teeth.

The Mythical Hero of Legend is Atlas bearing the weight of the heavens

Even when he’s rotting in his bedroom.

He’s reeling from a lifetime of people demeaning and lessening his presence,

first bullies, then professors, with lessons in quelling his legend,

and then in the present he’s putting in effort impressing incessant investors.

It bends him. Rends him. Condemned like a Trojan no Hector defending.

And while kingdoms immolate in dragon’s flames, he’s sat at home playing

video games because he comprehends himself as Untermenschen.

There’s no Nemean beast, no mares of Diomedes, the apples of Hesperides

still chill among the trees, the labours would seem unachievable

too if Heracles was Gen Z.

And though the world needs him, he can’t quite believe it.

A party made up of a priest and a thief

like in an RPG awaits him. He doesn’t know that those are his mates

who stayed with him. Who he’s airing because replying to their message

feels like writing an Epic. But the world cannot be rescued

by scrolling through Reddit. Upheaval cannot be bested

by a festering prisoner of terror.

The Mythical Hero of Legend must be his own medic.

Like Gilgamesh he must face the grotesque and behead it,

transform like an Ovid retelling. Not dread the unsettling,

accept it. The voice in his head will always be frenetic. Let it.

It won’t always be poetic. Even if he manages to build Rome from wreckage,

he is stuck behind a desk.

Shiva works for Unilever. Beowulf claims benefits.

The Mythical Hero of Legend is being suppressed and you, no less oppressed.

You get dressed, get stressed, do your best for a profession

that does not honour the hopes you’re repressing.

I am Tiresias the Prophet proclaiming a presage, you my friend are not pathetic.

Even if apathetic, even if dead, your life was a saga you scribed into cells.

The Mythical Hero works in sales. Works retail. Waits tables.

The Mythical Hero frees himself from Hades since maybe to be is worthy of fables.

And even though sometimes he dreams of the cleanest means to leave,

and there may come a day where that urge may defeat him.

Perceive that the prophecy breathed of him cleaving through demons.

And to exist. For an eon, or even, just for a minute, to meet them in conflict,

is mythic.

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