Venus the Cruel
© 2018 Vernon Miles Kerr
You are so like your sparkling, evening namesake,
(Long imagined a tropical paradise,
But now revealed a sulfurous hell.)
And you, are so unlike your cool, smooth.
Armless, lovely, marble depiction.
You, with your demonic cherubim
Ranging the Earth,
Puncturing the skin of the unwary
With darts dipped in elixir of insanity
Which concoction poisons reason:
Blinding its victim to any flaw in affection’s object,
Till he or she stupidly contracts away Self
To a potentially unworthy steward—
One who might absorb Self into his or her own,
Subsuming it, consuming it, sapping it of definition.
A contract, so fraudulent in the inception,
That even in puny man’s law, it would not stand.
But you, cruel Venus care not a whit
So long as your depraved impetus
To overpopulate the Earth
Is assuaged.