Invitation To the Dance

It is not the music, for one knows it in the heat that rises from a cool miasma, sardonic, self-igniting-- the one that ravages and never warms, consumes, and cannot care. Cold flame is of another art, and passionless. It is the counterpart of a humanity that gasps at loveliness but grasps an aged, trembling hand and cannot understand a trembling deity which would implore and not demand. It is a danse macabre... there is no peace in pretense, for it smells of fear, the while its nourishment is truth. It strikes through speaking through closed hands and open hearts. It makes of war and gentleness a home, an irony, and often even does it arm in arm. And how importunate, the lead who dares to ask of poverty a share of its insolvence-- knowing greed is corporate, while sacrifice is of the self alone. To find it set apart for lesser goals, it lies and gathers slippery sides, setting off solutions for another day; the night shall have its queen! For she is Paradox who sweeps across the room. In gracious rule she covets, blesses solitude, and ridicules its joy. Hers lurks behind a mask of beauty and romance; the skin is putrid, the conceit is infinite. Hers is the blood that feasts upon itself, that beats upon a tympanum within-- its cadence to the dance forever incomplete. ~