You must know—
your ivory face,
mirror eyes
that could belong to
a lover
a cat
a snake—your beauty
ensures that you know
what I see in my dreams
after the candles
are dimmed for the night
and my lover
or lovers
have left.

It takes a thief, they say, to know
a thief—to know
what you see in your dreams
what you’ve stolen from me
what I’m here
to take back.
Your eyes are still in that moment
when we crossed some line
I never knew existed.

In my last second
alive
I saw
your mirror eyes
echoing the last
of my reflection.

I am not this
tattered graveyard thing,
all skin and skull and hair
like little threads of obsidian
wrapped around us.
In your eyes I am still
my past—young
innocent, breathing,
dead.

I wasn’t hungry then—not like
I am now. It isn’t
a clean hunger, this craving
you pressed to my lips.
My mouth doesn’t want
blood or water,
anything pure or wholesome,
but flesh—
the red flesh of the living, the gray
flesh of the dead—and you,
ivory and hard as bone.

You must know why
I’m leaning over your bed,
its silken sheets still smelling
deliciously of breath.
Look up
straight into my mirror-eyes
and maybe, just maybe,
you know what you’ll see there…

You don't know
how much it's going to hurt.