Stolen Hearts

from Choral Soliloquies (I) by Stephen Mead

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Based on the Biddle Brothers and Mrs. Soffel

lyrics

Stolen Hearts


Helping you escape was my penance for God’s lie.
No, not God’s, but humanity’s:
Improper, contemptuous, their guilty scapegoating needs…
Why did I believe you that day, reading my bible
To you through the bars? Oh, people will say
It was loneliness, say I hated my warden husband & fell
Sway to your eyes. Not exactly. That’s too pat.
What you wanted was one person to see
You could kill no one
& then there was me.

I didn’t understand at first, neither of us did,
How a person’s faith may exchange places with another’s
Until both are transfigured by the single combined light.
No, I did not hate my husband &, if lonely, only
In the way many people are: through the silences
Of marriage, through the lives lived as expected & not
Comprehended until perimeters are fixed
& patrolled, patrolled…

How I breathed by such a pace, using Christian belief
For endurance, & how you told me your lack of it
After being dealt another cage.
Weeks went by & so what if I was being used?
Condemned to desperation, how else can trust be thrust
Forth but by measures of equal risk-----
A saw, a file…

It was I who stole your heart or why else
Would you come fetch me? Excess baggage, faith
Rearranged & on the run through nights of snow,
Trains, an abandoned mule wagon…
Oh Canada! Freedom! Tasting flight, open
Air & some farms’ chainless dream:
We would start over, our arms, pillows, our
Arms, kept promises-----
Except:
How chance betrays hope in the way posses hunt.
It didn’t take long…
Hooves, bullets, shouts…
I whispered in the thick,

“Quick shoot me here.”
How funny, your lousy mark, I lived
While you, to them, were suddenly beef,
Riddled on all fours.

Goodbye my warden husband.
What I’ve exchanged is the faith
Of your bars for these strange, these somehow
Innocent ones my lover never

Belonged to
Though once
I read him my bible

& found then, as I find now
another home here

credits

from Choral Soliloquies (I), released May 20, 2017
from FreeSound.org, contributors I.D. from site

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Stephen Mead Albany, New York

A resident of NY, Stephen Mead is a published outsider artist, writer, maker of short-collage films and sound-collage downloads. If you are at all interested please place his name in any search engine in conjunction with any of the above-mentioned genres for links to his multimedia work and merchandise. To order CDs via VISA or PayPal please visit stephenmeadmusic.weebly.com ... more

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