For purposes quite far from clarity
Amidst the wreckage of tradition's stare
I tumble thoughts as an impassioned nymph
To Whedon's shepherd. Every week I flow
Half-hoping venturer, in prose unfit,
To bring the revolutions of the mind
(The mind endowed by Muse of genius)
To paper. Now I start out once again
A ninetieth attempt to give the thread
Of Angel all the praise it still deserves.

Unleashed, unfettered, bound no longer stays
Emotions grind inevitably on
The bestial fervour reigns within us all
While incorporeal to stake its claim.
And when the creature manifests itself
How we react is what will make us more
Than animals, our human, cod reserve
Allows a dignity to mask our fears
Like clothes on naked skin. But when we lie
Like Nina in the dark, uncluttered cell
Disturbed by just what lurks beneath the veil
The naked visage haunting after fact,
We turn away unbearing of our soul.

And in this episodic tete-a-tete
Where scribes encourage us to watch, respond
Unknowing of the twisted thread to come,
We see this theme, the animal mankind,
Repeated. Here in third of five there's three.
In Nina, Angel, Spike. The artistry
Allows our common mind to intercede
And cobble quite miraculous mosaics,
Kaleidoscopes another writer claims.

Angel, the centre, anti-hero, lead
A trochee in an iamb's sole preserve
A leopard striped, an animal unknown,
Keeps all the anger hidden in a well
Rained in by world's half-careless fortitude.
Beneath the visage of the strong, good man
Lies vamp-face, Royce's fear tells us well
Just what the bestial anger might connote.
He claims, in helpfully poetic mode
'It wasn't you- it was the thing inside'
And here lurks Angelus, the shadow man
The distant centre, man on whom is built
Miraculous Xanadu of Angel's life
A Byzantine, baroque world full of stale
Delight, and plural wrongs still searching yet.
And while he saves the newest werewolf's skin
The lumberjack in 'Riding Hood' creeps in
To such a fevered mind as mine. We ask
Just who is who? For here our little child
Our nine year-old, the artist, the observer,
The future Angel, Nina, Gunn and Fred
Is Riding Hood, and Nina is the wolf,
And grandma too? The saviour in the end
Is Angel-lumberjack, who swings his axe
And yet will use a complex art of talk
To still the diatribe of Wolf a King
And not prevent the canine from existence
But rather show just how it is controlled,
How subjugated, not an Evil hidden.
An aspect of the man covered with sand.
So while we know that Angel's good advice
Has helped our Nina-wolf to save her life,
And not to feel each freak deserves a death,
We wonder whether to himself his own
Advice is rather dangerous, because
While feebly cornering Angelus' bite,
His anger resides deep yet unresolved
Til Gunn, the lackey gets the brunt of it
At moment seeming perfectly unfit.

The second wolf, Nina herself, the girl,
Who's already a woman, not a sister
But aunt to little child of fairy tale.
And what we see again here is the moon,
Which lights both Spike and Nina in the story
And the Werewolf Legend trips itself around
Here female. Where we once had Oz- whose song
Was male-ness under wraps, peacefully crooned
To sleep until the painful three days' space-
Here we encounter periods untamed.
That three day time when pain is guaranteed
Not themic only, hideously real.
Here Nina is the girl whose milk is red
Today, the next day, two days hence and then
Dropping away for double fortnight's width
Repeated, cyclical, half-like the moon
Waxing and waning in the darkened hours.

And so we have a link between the full
Grown woman and the paleness of man.
The half-seen, waxing, waning, in and out
Sometimes not there at all, others full yellow
The Hunter, if still incorporeal.
Reflected light, half-soul, half anger, half
too much to understand quite fully here,
But Spike is still the character whose run
Whose Voyage, Odyssey conflicts with myth.
He is the narrative's thorn, he Yorick's skull
The jester, out of time with earth with Sun,
With Father Angel, Brother, Patriarch,
And here throughout the conflict is hard hurt
By conflict between Nina and Spike's songs
An aria of womanhood set against
A not-quite-manhood slipping towards Hell.
And what of this fall, Saviour burning now
The Lucifer once Holy now renowned
And Diabolic, what for Spike's contin-
-uation through the mottled depth of life?
Angel is Atlas, Christian similes pale
Before the vengeful Greeks, their tragedy
And while he holds the world with not a shrug
Hades is his, ignored and unresolved.

Leaving the finished animal alive
With parts, Angel, Nina and old Spike
The unresolved with guilt still deep inside
The new and freakish set upon her path
And the reflection, yet to understand.
The past, the present, future, all contained
In minutes, Angel, Father, Nina, daughter
And Spike the Holy Ghost, for now and ever
World without end Amen. The echoes ride.

A gothic ending percolates this piece
With Royce deserving getting what's deserved
A just dessert to Nina's fraught main cause.
Or otherwise, for while to my mind this
Has nasty and delicious carelessness
First Hauser, Hainsley and now Royce despatched
With little more than cursory disdain,
Is good for Angel's story one must mull
On Angel's carnage and what it purports.
Before this, we have Fred the spectacled
Her character developing quite well
In measured time with Spike's high-octane Tales
The melo-drama seeping through his words
Rings happily in Fred's logistic head
And makes the Grecian magnitude of Ge
No more than mice half-ambling through a maze.
A maze without a centre we may say.
But fleeing isn't the right way to go,
And Fred has learnt, and now imparts her lore
To Nina, who's placated, more and more.
For finally, the word that Fred must find
Expressing links that casually winds
Around the thread of narrative that lurks
In all half-sensible dramatic works,
Is Family. The family of Tara,
The family that killed for the Amara,
The family of freaks, the strange-eyed crew,
Forever making plans forever new.
There's Gunn, disowned by choice, the legal man
The green-skinned from his Mother's beard ran
There's Fred, semi-detached from parent's South,
And Wesley for whom parents' wounding mouth
Is cushioned by Atlantic's myrtle tide,
And Angel for whom all links that reside,
Inside the defiant face stay half-effaced,
And talk of love with economy spaced.
The family begin with covert meets,
And end up safe in Angel's new retreat,
Ordering food that earlier, on his own
Angel had cooked for Wes- and- he alone?
In Parting Gifts. Here's still a story waiting
For conclusion and further demonstrating.

What else? 'Girls, guys and puppies' Angel saves
An Orphean allusion for Fred,
Distinct from all the stories of before.
But do we guess, that, Spin the Bottle, leading
surely on from Supersymmetry
That Craft and Fain's debut was really feeding
on the celestial hand of Whedonry?
For here there's solid-ness, and little more,
We see the Season bubbling on before us,
But while we've heard the verse, we're waiting for,
The resolution waiting in the chorus.

Thanks aliera, thanks to all who read.
By TCH, who's mad, and off to bed.