When it comes to lust, Rick Belden wonders what we’re really after.
◊♦◊
Behind the black curtain
Ugly parody of love
Quicksand flesh
I am sinking.
Too far gone
I can’t go home
Poisonous feast of
Fingers and tongues.
Empty universe
Primal isolation
I can’t find love
So I settle for meat.
Strange meat in my mouth
My meat in strange hands
She is meat
I am meat
We are meat.
I feed on her
She feeds on me
I feed on myself
I violate myself.
I strangle myself
I choke on dark flesh
Hungry and sick
Killing my soul
Trading my life
Throwing myself away
Over and over
For meat.
—Photo StuartWebster/Flickr
Are you sure this isn’t a Nine Inch Nails song? Seriously, though, you address an important topic that NIN have also touched on (I’ll go ahead and add Tool as well): that the ingrained sexual desire of human beings can persist unabated at any level, or no level at all, of emotional connection, and the disparity between the lack of one and the persistence of the other can create great suffering. And yet the poem is so self-loathing, as if the disparity proves something negative about us rather than merely that we’re human. It took me a long time, as… Read more »