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   ©2008 Stephen Mead