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.