You didn't believe that just to burn yourself out

To the hymns of martyred

Clavicals was enough

You requested something more

Of your patella and your humerus

Because even when you boiled down your fat

Like it was for cooking pancakes in

You could not bring yourself

To fill your stomach with anything more than perfumes

And promises as empty as the cavern

Of your unkissed throat

And when your bones did not oblige

You began to screw your fingers tighter

Around each and every narrowing part of you

And it was harrowing to see

The way that your fingernails -

The only part of you still permitted to grow -

Tried to root out trenches along your vertebrae

From which you could battle your way

To fatal victory

And there were many casualties of trench warfare

But it was not barbed-wire and shelling

But fingernails that decimated me

Because I knew that every single one of your phalanges

Wanted to coil itself around

Your spinal cord

And pull sn-

-ap