We believe villains are more than just two dimensional evil-doers. They're complex characters who rarely get to share their stories. The concept may seem silly, but empathy is a skill. If we can practice it here, we just might have a shot at understanding the 'villains' in our everyday lives.
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|| “The Heart of Caledon Hockley” ||
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The Heart of the Ocean:
built from hope and sapphire blue,
once owned by the guillotined
King Louis XVI,
cradled in Cal’s
respectable hands,
it gleams,
he dreams,
the wind plays
with his black strands,
as he seeks comfort onboard
the indestructible Titanic,
and she listens with vertical kisses
to his disheartened whispers,
to what all of his critics
don’t understand,
why he stands disheveled
with just a touch of the devil
on this moving vessel.
—————————————————
You see,
he wasn’t always made of steel,
while Jack and Rose had dreams of
making love in automobiles,
he was trying to heal
all of the hurt he fought to conceal,
all of these woes from past love ideals,
the bitter taste
of young love
on his tongue,
sitting on
some summer beach in Cape Cod,
an untroubled boy
with a faultless heart
speaking to a selfish girl
disguised as art,
her seafoam purse teeming
with the riches of an older man
and this greedy daughter
picked up
Cal’s heart from the sand,
and threw it into the swallowing water.
—————————————————-
Rose was a beauty
with thorns,
Cal was a man torn in two,
learning long ago that women
fell in love with glimmering gold
more than they did
with swimming souls,
and this time,
this time
he wasn’t going to let her slip off
the railing and into the arms of another
even if it meant
paying the debts of her mother,
even if it meant
forcing others to suffer,
even if it meant
he had to be a rougher lover,
or smothering her
in order to love her.
—————————————————
Obsessed,
possessed,
a heartless mess;
he was going to lay claim
to his father’s fortune
at the hands of extortion,
with roaring commotion,
all to redeem
his missing organ
lost in the ocean,
and by God,
she was going to love him
because he was going to give her
the Heart of the Ocean,
his only love token,
his only hope
to repair what’s broken,
the only heart
he had left to give her.
He thought maybe,
just maybe,
she would strip off her pearls
and she would finally learn
to love
the carcass
of
a heartless
human.
—————————————————-
The tangled chains
fall between his fingers,
and the weight of the pendant
sits in the palm of his spending hands,
stripped of his once good title
by the lips of unfair judges,
crippled by the ripples
of a love forever under review,
he searches for his heart
in the sea of mazarine blue,
hoping one day
it would find its way,
crawling
back
to
the sand
and into his chest,
still beating,
still breathing,
waiting to inhale love again
just like all
poor
love
deprived
men.
——————————————————
|| A. Fortin ||
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