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.
Vernon Miles Kerr 
Sounds like you’ve met my step mother.
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Ha ha, no specific person in mind. (Really) 😀
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I got to thinking about the YL’s accusation of misogyny, below. There may be an element of that from childhood—where the bully next door was a girl, several years older than I—or from teen-hood where “Venus” (the part of the human psyche that causes unwarranted infatuation for an unworthy and disinterested love-object) caused me to make a fool of myself with dramatic social consequences. But is wasn’t the fault of the young lady who—as it turned out, only wanted a “boy toy” —so much as it was the fault of “Venus,” with her “darts dipped in elixir of insanity” VMK
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Poor Venus, or “woman”, always at the mercy of the misogynist, particularly if there is unrequited love.
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Hmmm, I should have mentioned that the metaphorical Venus is non-binary, gender-x. 😉
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