Twisted Feet and Broken Shoes

I, I live among the creatures of the night
I haven't got the will to try and fight
Against a new tomorrow, so I guess I'll just believe it
That tomorrow never knows

A safe night, I'm living in the forest of a dream
I know the night is not as it would seem

Self Control by Laura Brannigan.

It's hard to dance when the music is just torture -
a vicious, raping noise that won't allow you to cease from twisting in
contorted angst to its unceasing execution of the soul.

She sat beside the lakeside, her pale face
already flushed with the red of tears,
expressing the anguish of her generation -
a people broken by the poison of 'modern' life
- always frantic, always blurred, always bleeding.

The diary entry of many years ago is fresh in the mind...
'If I can love you, why can't I touch you?'

Her friend is close by, and speaks of her own current pain
- of men seeking to abuse her
- men she should be able to respect and trust.

It is the murder of our world - the killing of what God wishes us to be.
Children defined and oh so refined by grace,
by the care which would never extinguish the smallest glimmer of light.

God give us the grace, the compassion,
to seek to bind such wounds,
to begin to speak to sever the strings of such tyranny.

Love is not easy.
It calls us to to turn from the lie of insignificance
- to recognize the astonishing,precious value of another,
to encounter such a compassion
that it will mean a death to selfish aims and ambitions,
a tussle with reality that burns and breaks us,
dislocated from independence, needing to love more.

The world, as Larry Norman noted,
'continues to play in the only way it knows how'.
It needs to see something deeper, richer
- something which threatens, which speaks so deep,
that the whole of life can be made whole.