Beauty and the Beast

Beauty and the Beast

There swims in each of us, a catalyst for dreams,
an urgency that calls from shores that never were,
a twinge of terror, lining distant paradise,
uniquely all one's own.

No one knows where all this comes from.
Oh, perhaps it is innate desire
to temper every fortune
with a modicum of pain, a hint
that if we know that all is not quite well,
we simply shrug it off
and chase the angst away.

First sight became
a theatre of absolute deliciousness,
a goddess with the right excess
of pulchritude to send
my conscious spirit spinning off
on errands of delight, my body
journeying a fantasy of flight with her,
for no one else created in a smile
such sinister conspiracy of mirth.

It was not she who cowered
at the brutish mien
so tactfully unroared,
but I, the ingenue, who saw
the beast had not consumed her; no,
he lurked there in her carnal confidence,
his quivering claws impatient
for contumely, catastasis
and my condign consent.
~