I Never Would Have Cried

You took five years to tell me you were dead, love.
You'd walked out long before
Yet I followed your voice across the galaxy:
Love makes all of us fools.

Power became my lover.
Power is like a drug.
It dulls the pain of betrayal
distracts and bemuses like a child's bauble,
keeps you busy, a demanding lover
with no cause for jealousy
for no man can be trusted
No-one can be true.
"Use and discard" is all they know
and all that I know, too.

But I met a riddle.
He cannot exist, yet he persists
in being admirable.
Not merely cunning, intelligent, subtle,
Mocking, attractive, sophisticated, but also -
Impossible!
No-one is faithful after treachery,
Yet he loves her still.
No-one is loyal unto death,
Yet when my trap snapped
he was prepared to die
rather than surrender.
Every test of trueness, he passed.
All that I could dream of, but never have:
Trapped, he could not love his gaoler
Freed, he would not stay to love;
Tamed, I would not wish for him,
Wild, he would not wish for me.
Corrupted, he'd be no longer true,
Untainted, I'd have no hold on him;
Pardoned, he'd wander his own way;
Killed - then I could never win.

Tangled in my snare of a life
I am defeated by paradox.

-- Kathryn A

(written in 1987 in response to Geoff Tilley's comment that he didn't
see what Servalan saw in Avon.)