from Songs of Ani

3 the morning sun steams through a break in the bamboo curtains and drizzles through a veil of dust over Ani's body where she lies on the bed unadorned but for a gold chain curling around her thin neck beneath a cascade of feathers falling from her hair her skin is soft and young like a blank page from a notebook smooth and white waiting only for time to write its inevitable story in black ink smudges across her beauty and crease such pristine alabaster with cruel lines of experience and though i hesitate between the longing and the first kiss between the imagined readiness and the unexpected sensation i claim my place in the first pages of her story as i scrawl simple lines of paradoxical poetry across her willing flesh and tattoo her with a simple prologue and a complicated warning to every man who travels her body a simple caution that everything perfect easily flames into fulfilment only to lose its miraculous first spark that is too soon extinguished in a bed of grey ashes Copyright © Kennedy James, 2011. All rights reserved.