LINDA
“songs like a practiced whore
who turns away from no one
but the one who loves her.”
–Djuna Barnes
How deathly strange it all seems—
especially here on the thin edge of passion,
where all eyes chilled into beauty
in blind innocence shield themselves
against the night rain of reality;
how strange what a worldliness of difference,
even at our ages of man,
one simple kiss makes between two people
who never before that soft moment touched their lips
knew how much sorrow they had in common
or how much joy.
photograph by Evelyn Bencicova
Of the “10,000” girls I’ve seen standing on street corners,
whose hard eyes like yours warned me into caution,
until then you were the least of images
my groin might have warmed to
or the catholicity of my faith
recognized as the purity I feel you are.
It is whores like you,
with all your feigned deceptions,
who time after time prove beyond question
the perfumed existence of that stunning black hole
known to mystics as God.
–Eddie Woods
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Photographs Poetry