Poets

The moon is battered tonight, bruised and swollen, but she swanks above us, bringing joy to the chill. Tallow-moon, electric-moon, she shoulders the sky,

On Half Moon Street we eat Tunisian orange cake, under a painting of a melon that spills seeds like love.

My body is a palimpsest under your hands, a papyrus scroll unfurled beneath you, waiting for your mark. I clean my skin, scrape it back to a pale parchment, so that your touch can sink as deep as the tattooist's ink, and leave its tracery over the erased lines of other men. You are all that's written on my body.