The Heresy of Love

“The light of the future never stops wounding us…”
……– Pier Paolo Pasolini

A young woman-child holding the tatters of a red scarf,
……her eyes defiant in the bright sun,
………….the hills falling
down around her bone-lithe youthful image;
a world ringing round her like a ferris-wheel gone mad
…….among the whirling clouds of stars and soldiers,
………….where she lays below
like a judgment against their fractured light.

She did not speak nor cry, her lips
……….synching to the silences of stone doves –
……….a gap between present need
……………and future possibility,
lost among the shifting vagaries of her torn rags, half-naked
……….baking in the ferment
…….of this noon’s bleak memories.

Is this the terror of existence that marks our secret histories?

Only these disturbances in the cracked earth:
………the blood and mire, the urine –
…………….the human feces sunken among black pools,
…………….the acrid stain of stars gone blind; when night
………comes too late, the expected guest driven
from one’s mind like a door shutting violently;
……….for whom this atrocity begs lacerating truth
…………….stare back at you from pale mirrors, her face
(where like a poet one touches time and ugliness –
……….a beauty surpassing the banal
……….fixtures of the obvious) – blank and white
against the darkening of the moon,
she bids you see into not with those eyes,
……….see what is as it is, the real
…………….that cannot be resolved into bleak cries;
a truth that not only knows the flesh in our flesh, a desire
……….that lures us out of our deadly masks,
……………..but knows that dangerous heresy of love
……….that gives us back again the utterance,
the voicing against which even the stars hold no fatal influence.

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– Steven Craig Hickman ©2015 Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author is strictly prohibited.