A sickness of the mind, thank the gods, and not of the soul.
See, those that suffer from the soul cannot be saved in life but only in death. And the saving is in a world not governed by the same pace and speed of opportunity and grace. I can heal. My mind is what plagues me, and it is only me that gives it power, I give it release through imprisonment by longing.
Given years ago a poet's charm, a sweetness like nectar in arms, I asked each lover of mine for devotion and devotion's bind.
Behold, the libertine of prose is really a tyrant in love. She seeks dominion over the broken and diseased. And with a healing touch, slips the opium right into their sleeves.
Why do they clamor after her, crazed and possessed? They either stagnate with apathy, or cling obsessed. There is no love in the tomb of beguiled and regret.
Slowly now, she will see why she has been called Black Widow so early in her youth. Unwed yet, uncouth when betrayed... she possesses all the symptoms of the poisonous spider. Spins her web and entraps only the ones suffering from a sickness of the soul. The souls who are doomed in this life and await their atonement in the next, she cradles them to her chest and weeps tears of grudging surrender. Knowing they can never love her, but are bound to her all the same by the web that keeps them spinning. They hang, suspended. Until one by one, she severs the thread.
What beauty and chaos lives beneath the folds of each human? Distorted by life's cruelties... I have become a sweet poison to myself in this quest to practice love from desire.
I both long to love everything painful in another, and wish to cure it. To make it whole again and better.
Empathy I know well, but compassion is just a synonym of forgiveness. And I know nothing yet of forgiveness.