knee-reaching, my hair dusted your trousers

that billowed around me like circus tents

with you, the pallid clown marionette,

emaciated under reams of swarthy silk.

contrast of black against your rice-paper skin;

the images stuck to me and burnt lacerations

in the zenith of nights where ink flood spread out

around me. You said black would

eat the slab of alabaster that clung to your thighs

temporarily, that is until something could be done to

burn them away to ashes of white.

You, pallid clown marionette, withering under this

bulging mass of onyx in a

media woven circus of death.

smiling with angry sockets that accented

principle poverty sprung from

masculine malnourishment.

Last hug, pressed against black. All

I could feel was the livid

spike of your spine. Through comforts

I could hear the fading beats of your

heart as they battered its own requiem.