Ditto by Amy Charlotte Kean

Ditto 

Ditto is a Pokémon, and to the untrained eye mere useless  blob of beaming lilac mulch,  Utterly underestimate-able.  

Splayed and genderless  a Ditto can transform;  rewire its cellular structure to  mimic the enemy’s genetic code.

Through such rearrangement it is entirely possible to  emerge from battle a monster. A distorted product of memory. 

For some time I was Ditto. We all are, of course. Becoming  the thing we are told  we must assume we have been

when sent to the wall, to hear childish screams echo in the playground behind. Sent to hell, to Coventry, our man’s home town to float amongst the broken souls and ravaged egos. 

In mirrors, suspended in confusion  I couldn’t see a monster, nor sense the darkness others saw, that retched leech they spoke of.

My lists of monstrosities, persistent like gum  that welds to skirts and tangles hair with vacant, beige elasticity. 

You bought a shovel.  Dipped it in bleach like Squirtle spitting away the cracked soil to reveal a fresh, augmented reality.

The golden ball, the blob, the creature before the monster,  shapeshifting back into you: my original, endless form.

Amy Charlotte Kean

Amy Charlotte Kean is an advertising strategist, innovation consultant and writer from Essex. Her first book, the number 1 bestselling The Little Girl Who Gave Zero F*cks was published in 2018 with Unbound. Amy's rants, reviews, short fiction and poems have been published in The Guardian, Huffington Post, Disclaimer, Glamour, Abridged, Burning House Press, Poetry Village and many others. She was shortlisted in the Reflex Flash Fiction competition and was an Ink, Sweat & Tears poet of the month. Her second book, House of Weeds, is out in May with Fly on the Wall Press. Twitter: @keano81

About This Poem

"This poem began as a love letter to someone else, and then I changed my mind, so it ended as an ode to me. Because fuck it. This is how it should be."