Invisible
Let me don a cloak of invisibility
that which makes me invisible to others.
Even if they see me
they will see me
as a part of the landscape
or as a part of themselves.
The wallflower
that was always there
blending into the background,
the chameleon
that is the leaf
on the ground.
Nothing out of ordinary -
a raindrop
on a rainy day
dissipating in the mind,
the fallen lash
that grants a wish
when blown in the wind.
This cloak is a useful thing
keeps me
from getting plucked away
being put into a vase till I wither,
or becoming an exhibit
in the museum of anomalies,
an item in the miscellaneous bucket
with low/no priority,
getting relegated to the freak show
because
I am not able to go with the flow.
How do I become invisible to myself though?
Where is the cloak
that makes me part of you
with blended colours
and not the blue?
L'homme invisible (The Invisible Man) -- Salvador Dali
The Stith Thompson motif index includes D1361.12, magic cloak of invisibilty." It was a common theme in Welsh and Germanic folklore. The longest surviving Welsh prose tale is the 11th-century "Culhwch ac Olwen" and is perhaps the oldest literary work featuring king Arthur, who possessed a "mantle of invisibility" which was one of the things the king refused to grant to Culhwch. A century or two later the lien, called Gwenn, was described in more detail in "Breuddwyd Rhonabwy" (The Dream of Rhonabwy) and in the 15th or 16th century was listed among the "13 treasures of the Island of Britain" (Tri Thlws ar Ddeg Ynys Prydain). A similar mantle appears in the "Mabinogi," in which it is used by the usurper Caswallawn to assassinate the seven stewards left behind by Bran the Blessed (Bendigeidfran or Brân Fendigaidd, literally "Blessed Crow"). In German literature Sifrit (Siegfried) acquired one from the dwarf Alberich in the epic "Nibelungenlied;" it not only made him invisible but increased his strength. A similar device was featured in Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm's 1812 collection of fairy tales, in "Die Zwölf Tanzen Prinzessinnen" (The 12 Dancing Princesses) and especially "The King of the Golden Mountain." In the English fairy tale "Jack the Giant Killer" Jack spared the life of a giant, who gave him a cloak of invisibility in gratitude. (This is similar to the Japanese story of Momotarō, who acquired a straw cape or raincoat of invisibility from ogres.) More recently the device was employed by Edgar Rice Burroughs in "A Fighting Man of Mars" (1931), by J. R. R. Tolkien in "The Lord of the Rings" in which Frodo Baggins' elven cloak camouflaged him so that the enemy could see "nothing more than a boulder where the Hobbits were," and by J. K. Rowling in her series of books about Harry Potter.
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