Artificial passion

I.

What's artificial is their passion.

It's akin to the "Just Like" colognes

from the dollar store:

no pain, no doubts

nothing hot enough to burn someone;

nothing raw enough to expose ones blood.

It's sanctity that's dead letters in a book

ones we dream"if only's" about.

II.

I trip upon my struggles

my pretences to follow you

to cling tenaciously with passion

to whatever I need to mimic you.

Your feet have pressed into the land

their mark of passion that's real obsession:

red roses soaked in gall

beaten and stirred to the sweetest fragrance

borne stately like thorns circling the skull

and binding like nails through one drooping wrists.

You rub against my coward's flesh

to summon me whene'er you call

your niggling spirit pushing me 

through tears difficult to swallow.

III.

There's no escape but death

no assurance to measure ones step.

Send quickly then your Paraclete

and coax me up your hill.

I'll cry, "Abba-Daddy, give me a hand"

cause I'm scared to taste your redemption meat.

*Reflections of Alan Jones:

-Love is a kind of pain for which we are starved.  The pain comes when all that we have tried to deny will be denied on longer.  The soul suffocates when it is walled up. No wonder it resorts to violence when the pressure gets too much.  Love, the wild card, comes to such a soul by first puncturing the hardened shell in which it has encased itself.  Love, therefore, often comes as a terror - a threat to the self-protecting carapace under which we shelter.  A friend explains to William Golding's hero Wilfred the dire consequences to the soul that constructs for itself  a protective shell.

You see, you are what biologists used to call exoskeletal.  Most people are..endoskeletal, have their bones inside.  But you, my dear, for some reason known only to God...have spent your life inventing a skeleton on the outside.  Like crabs and lobsters.  That's terrible, you see, because the worms get inside, and...they have the place to themselves.   So, my advice...is to get rid of the armour, the exoskeleton, the carapace, before it's too late.

The task of love is to help us rid ourselves of the exoskeleton, to lay us bare, to set us free.