She has a smile like broken glass,
sharp, glinting in the sun,
and her feet sway with the secret rhythms
of a bonfire in the wind;
maybe one burning books, cassettes, and *****.



Her hair is the black of nights that inspired poets
to write odes to broken gods.


And her eyes—those swampy, willow-the-wisp lures
that guided a hundred men
to ecstatic and drowning graves under the murk,
they call to you like misplaced lighthouse beacons
yearning for a shore and harbor.

So when you see her vampiric skin,
white as cobwebbed moonlight,
of course you are drawn to it:
drawn to the bleeding gashes she makes when she cuts you
with her tongue,
the furrows she sows with her fingernails in your back
to plant the seed of unrequited want,
drawn to the burdened lockboxes she buries so tantalizingly deep
in her soul.

Go, excavate them in the drunken sharing of mysteries,
and then tomorrow morning,
when you know better,
leave her curled in hangover,
awaiting the next in line to pretend that they only want to heal her
of the infinite, parasitic sadness
that people like you
have built up in her like a lonely castle
slowly and endlessly
over the years.