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. ~