Our Skin His Paper

Like the others, he is drawn to vacancy,

parting lips like an unturned page.

It’s not really our youth he’s drawn to, is it?

It isn’t just supple flesh that tempts him, no:

It’s our blank slate that unfolds like an offering.

Paper-thin, that’s how he likes us!

Carte blanche is the skin of our bodies to him,

and he spares us the riddles of language

while giving no name to the flesh-bound lyricism

his fingers leave behind,

transitory on the pages of our skin.

Eyes like blank slates beckon him,

the parchment of our youth laid bare and fluttering

madly, like book-leaves in the wind.

We will do the work: to scrape the pulp and parchment,

to hang the sheets drying from the rafters,

to blacken the inkwells of our eyes,

to pluck our own plumage to furnish a quill –

Tell him to ready his writing instrument, because

here is the empty manuscript of our skin,

here the blank pages of our youth leave space

for the pen-strokes of anyone’s ink,

their narratives that mean nothing at all.

When he’s finished he can feed us to his candlelight.

He will consume our corpus completely

with less consideration than he grants a passing thought.

Like the others, he will barely remember us,

except for the drops of blood we left

somewhere in his untamed manuscript,

heart-shaped, on a page he won’t bother to read.