I wear a white suit:
skin-tight, rhine-stoned.
The audience always gasp:
imagining he attacks me,
raising red muscles to a human-stand.
But it is love that trembles over,
its claws steadying my small shoulders.

I wear a white suit:
so his passion is invisible,
my scars, covered.
Yes, I’ve come close enough –
in the past they’ve turned and ravaged me,
finding themselves back in that never-known dust,
lusty for munch of bone and suck of silk.
My white suit should be barred with black.

I love him more than any man.
At night I rest my head and hands
in his dangerous halo,
breathing the musk of blood and dung.
Every evening after the come-in,
after the slap of the switch,
when the sloping prowl begins,
He eyes me up,
then the white lines that remember him
ache to be reopened.