White thighs like slices of white cake -
three pre-teenage girls on a subway
talking excitedly about what they will
see and do and buy downtown, while near them
a man stares, then pulls back to look
at the slash and jab of graffiti.
He sees himself as trying to balance
on the peak of a steep metal roof
but once again he turns to watch
the girls in their grown-up dresses,
their eye-shadow and painted mouths. How
white the skin must be on the insides
of their thighs. He can almost taste
their heat and he imagines his teeth
pressed to the humid flesh until once more
he jerks back his head like yanking
a dog on a leash, until he sees his face
in the glass, gray and middle-aged. The night,
he thinks, the night - meaning not simply
night-time but those hours before dawn
when he feels the 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 hateful stalk. White thighs -
to trip or slip on that steep metal roof:
his final capitulation to the dark.