Poetry | Venus the Cruel


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.

 

 

5 thoughts on “Poetry | Venus the Cruel

  1. 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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