White Thighs.
Three pre-teenage girls on a crowded subway
talking excitedly about what they will see, and do, and buy
downtown while near them a man stares then
twists away to look at the slash and jab of the graffiti.
He sees himself as attempting to balance
on the peak of a steep metal roof.
But once again he turns back to watch the three
girls in their grown-up dresses, their eye shadow and painted
mouths.
How white the skin must be on the insides
of her thighs and their cunts, with only a faint covering
of down.
He can almost taste their heat.
He imagines his teeth pressed to the soft flesh of their thighs.
And for once more he yanks back his head,
like yanking a dog on a leash until he
sees his face in the glass of a door, gray and middle-aged.
The night, he thinks, the night--
meaning not simply nighttime but those hours
before dawn when he feels his hunger
as if it were a great hulking creature
in the hallway outside his door, some beast of darkness.
And again he feels his head beginning
to twist on its putrid stalk.
White thighs-- to trip or slip on that steep metal
roof, his final capitulation to the dark.