Detatched features,
Faces, fingers, scalps, and skin
By silver knives and blunted hammers
Stripped from many and made whole again.
The Human Ideal and depraved’s obsession,
Perfection in a women’s form,
Assembled with passion, ardor, and precision
From stolen bodily possessions and one pair of volunteered eyes.
Her mother blinded, her father fanatic,
The night dreary when she came alive,
The mind of a girl with the body of an angel,
A gift to the world, the artist’s nightmare and scientist’s prize.
By design, incomparable to any other being,
At sight, overwhelming one’s sensitivities to shape and light,
And having glimsed her, any obscurrance of her face induced pain
In the heart so profound whole crowds were made to cry.
Musicians and poets wrote nothing more but about her,
Some despaired knowing what they could never have or be,
Multitudes gathered daily to witness and adore her,
All the while laying cash and other gifts at her maker’s feet.
The living embodyment of faultless beauty
Drew wealth and satiation into her father’s hands,
Admired by all the world for merely existing,
Her mother, whose eyes she had, became her only friend.
The crowds, left outside constantly yearning,
Grew more restless, depressed, and frenzied every day,
Bewitched every moment she allowed them her presence,
Dead to all pleasure while she was away.
In time, sight alone wasn’t enough to ease their torment,
And an unprecedented emptiness stole their collective minds,
Demands to be loved by the being that was perfect
Grew from callous whispers to a full-blown battle cry,
But the angel, who was a girl, hardly loved a soul,
The consuming gaze of strangers seperated her from all
But the mother, being blind, who saw her without desiring
And the father who idealized her as art’s true and final form.
The final levy broke, and the people flooded their home,
Cornering her in the attic where she’d only recently been born,
The crowd shouted unanimously for the love that they deserved,
With guns, torches, and hungry eyes prepared to take by force.
There is no way to love anyone by choice, the angel knew,
But when so many want your life there’s little you can do,
Ascending down the letter, every voice was silenced,
Scalpel in her hand, she did what was required.
She slid the steel past her cornea and cut the optic nerve,
One after the other and offered them to her observers,
“My mother’s eyes are the only gift I ever truly loved,
Take them and know I’ve given you all I have.”
Torches were dropped, legs fell away as if broken,
A stifled cry echoed loudly and gave way to screams unrestrained,
Many shots were fired into the temples of their holders,
And many more gave in, weeping into the devouring flames.
The house erupted, the blinded angel bleeding, motionless,
Suffocating, sweltering, and without thought of escape.
A pair of arms found her, above them all the most devoted,
The eyeless mother, holding tight as the world fell away.
