Aphrodite's Tears

A/N: This is a poem written in protest to the recent blatant censorship of all NC-17 fanfiction on this site. What a sad day it is when we wake up and realised we've compromised our imaginations and passions. Aphrodite is used because I've always been fond of her and if anyone, she of all stands for the indulgence of love and desire and there's a strange honesty in that I admire. It's a beautiful thing, whether creative, soulful or lustful and we are all the poorer without it and higher-rated 'fics.

In a decaying world of stone and phantoms

Void of passion, desire and unbridled imagination,

Those blazing colours that make our souls vivid.

We crumble with loss and wonder what life feels like

To feel and burn with feelings of raw sensitivity

With hearts filled to the brim with emotion

To know that the world does not fade to black.

Amongst the ruins, mourning the summer

Stands a woman, beautiful and terrible in her fury

Once golden-haired, long-legged and shimmering with glory

Built from passion, living on love, feeding on desire

Emerging from turquoise depths to lay claim on our hearts

Draped in seaweed caressing her nakedness

With reverence and lust, it clings to her

As we all did once.

She gave us the gift of love;

Hearts to love, bodies to love with

Innocent and pure through rough wildness

This is her gift.

Her gift we forsook as we rebuked her

Shunning her from our souls, proclaiming her wicked

Striking away her comforting warmth

To don a coat of loneliness and misery in her place

Forsaking a lover's touch as we drive our shining goddess away

And sparking out the sun in all our selves

The light that brings fire to our hearts and loins

Throwing away the traces of imaginative colour

Cursing the brand of her touch,

Treating our goddess as a shamed harlot.

And Aphrodite weeps.

Now reduced to a frail old woman,

A pock-marked face spun from sagging skin

Gold faded into silver

The wickedly childish light in her eyes burnt out

By the flame of our scorn

Anger; our last passion, before we lose even that.

And still she weeps for lost passion

For those who forsook the art of love, the need to express;

In all its forms.

In fear of our goddess deflowering innocent buds

In a fit of her love for us.

But now those pristine flowers cannot blossom,

They lack nectar-filled hearts, sweetened by life

They become a tangle of degenerate weeds

And our goddess cries for them, for all they will never know.

We compromised our passions

And flung the awkward thing from our breasts

And now inhabit a world built on emotionless intellect

Though all lasting monuments are carved by love's hand.

The world is grey and dead, its soul long stripped away

When the lynching mob rejected one who cared for us

All turbulent powers were lost to us

And we have forgotten what lust was,

What is was to be bathed in the burning petals

Strewn upon us by Eros' arrow.

We reject desire, it is unmentionable once more

Faded from empty souls

And we are both redeemed and destroyed without her.

And Aphrodite weeps on

As she grieves all her slain children,

Lamenting in the crumbling turrets of a hollow world

Stripped of all feeling and want, the blood in our veins.

As she wanders; loveless and alone

Searching for shattered remains of souls bound by inhibition

Scorched to nothing, with no phoenix to arise

From the smouldering ashes that whisper

Of a shadow of passion.

We are hollows, gaping wide and jagged, without her

And the ghosts of our haunted hearts cry with her, still tangible.

We are alone.