If love is an art-form,
   I beg you,
      do not choose me.
Do not paint,
   with fingertips tracing my skin,
The colour of your love,
   with the slashes of your paintbrush upon my flesh,
In a torrent of red velvet,
   surging from your screaming veins.
If I lie there in wait, draped over cotton bedsheets,
   I beg you
      do not make me your canvas.
      Do not make me your art
and leave me
                       hanged
                                     for all the world to see
   while you marvel at the beauty
you created.

                                                            *-j.s.