Everyone has felt it just as I have.  It catches my eyes like a jewel shining with brilliant light, each facet more difficult to resist than the last, burning like hot fire in my mind and heart.  It slips into my life like an old comfortable friend.  Familiar voices beckon with promises of comfort and fulfillment.

It offers a world of pleasures and lays them at my feet in offering.  Even now, the taste of it is on my lips: the wine of recklessness.  How sweet the aroma.  How tempting the flavor.

Driven by desires blown through me like leaves on the wind, its foot is in the door before I realize it.  I resist, or so I tell myself, and I try to keep it from coming through.  Can it even be denied?

Yet the rebel within me longs to be free.  It’s hungry to be wild.  Do I let it run just this once, give it the existence it so longs for?

Like a foolish child, I listen to it and hear its call.  It stirs my soul in a way I can not fathom with its vows and satisfying laughter and hints of satiating dreams both known and unimagined.

What is my reason to resist?  Fear of tearing my heart asunder?  Fear of being caught?  Fear of punishment?

Once again, I hold steadfast and deny it entry.  I scream at it in anger: leave me alone!  Even I know that it is my own longing which calls forth this temptation.  The demon’s teeth would bear no threat were it not for my own human weakness.

Leave me alone!  I say it again.  Leave me alone!  Will it obey?  Or will it deny me refuge and take the moment’s innocence?  I can not see all ends.

Grasping at me violently, I fight back with all  my strength, yet increasingly a part of me wishes to give in to the wrong.

Then, just as suddenly as it began, the struggle is over.

It takes leave.  As I watch it carried away from me on whispers of disappointment and assurances of return, I already miss it.  Have I erred?

I find joy in knowing it will be back, and fear in not knowing whether I will have the strength to keep it at bay.

Yes, wrong can sure look good sometimes.

[circa 1987]