When Eros was born, cauled and pastey, he loved.
With his first breath he named his love in wordless wail of infant tongue.
He grabbed at the tit of love and suckled till it bled.
He burned love on the pyres of his fevers and battered it with pudgey fists.
And love was not unsteadied.
He rebelled and love admonished.
And so he cried tight tears of rage and swore revenge in secret heart.
Thwarted once too often, Eros learned to lie.
Taken to the house of God, Eros tried to learn to love anew.
But God remained coy, and hid amongst the liturgies, aloof to childish suit.
Lovelorn Eros left the altar, and stole the book from the lecturn.
He learned the lesson of Cain, and tried to murder his sibling.
Love struck a ring upon his forehead with chastising hand.
He learned the lesson of the Prodigal, and slowly, methodically, he killed each and every dream ever had for him.
Hoping achieving his own would make him thrice beloved.
In time his prick lengthened, and his body grew.
A fire awoke within him, curled along and around and banished childhood fancy.
He fed it, stoked it, spent it over air-brushed idols with feet of clay.
Driven, he sought out the trollops of the marketplace and caught their lusty gaze.
They baptized him in cuntjuice and christened him in tongues.
In vanity he left each in turn, repulsed by their fond remembrances.
Adept now, he took on all comers, in a concupiscence of thrashing limbs.
Crushing flesh against foreign flesh, turning it this way and that, to see what fit:
Cusp of hip to curve of pelvis, rounded thigh to fatted calf, cup-cake breast to bladed clavicle, and sharp teeth to hollow throat.
One by one he killed them all.
He choked the mother, smothered under her tolerant smile.
He slew the adventuress, too stubborn to learn the world by proxy.
He throttled the waif, never sated her needy glance too much to bear.
He paupered the dutchess, spurning her full coffers and empty sophistry.
He dulled the artiste, her portraits too knowing for him to see easily.
Weary disillusioned unloved and unloving barren he fled.
He went far away, over the sea, to a place with no words.
He found silence within cacophony, and peace within hardship.
Silver tongue stuttering stilted in his throat, he could lie no longer.
“I love” He said, to fill the void.
Then sickness came and drove him mad.
Vectors too strange to be easily subsumed whirled within his blood.
Love nursed him with kind hand, but sweaty and raving, he plotted escape.
A last minute’s confessional, a last second’s betrayal, a final coward’s farewell.
“But wait” love said and stayed his flight, “Where you go I will follow.”
And so freed, he suddenly found he could not move.
His feet, unnoticed, had grown roots that bound him to the land.
Sanctified love staled in church and mosque, bound hip to hip and tooth to nail.
Old ghosts arose in webbed rags and warfare ripped asunder love’s calm.
Love fought and tore and bit and chewed, and fucked and cried and disavowed.
A jumbled carnage of life and soul, indistinct and bruised and whole.
One thing, one heart, one mind, maimed hands holding tightly.
One and one soon made three.
When Eros was born, cawled and pastey, he loved.
With his first breath he named his love in wordless wail of infant tongue.
He grabbed at the tit of love and suckled till it bled.
He burned love on the pyres of his fevers and battered it with pudgey fists.
And love was not unsteadied.