She wears dreadful Victorian jewellery,
with stones the colour of piss
that match the lambency of leopard eyes;
twin settings of feral mystery,
of feline hunters in the mist,
who stalk and strike with impunity and cruel surprise.
She wears her freckles like a dappled fur,
beneath which her muscles flex
and stress the angularity of a lissom frame
drawn tight over bony spurs,
while the gilt ringed hollow of her neck
invites fellow predators to press their fanged claim.
She wears the years as stylishly as a stole
of entrails torn from her latest kill;
a blood-warm wrap against the chill privation
of a lustful life no longer whole,
but defined by malice and ill-will
and all the carnal cravings of her soul’s starvation.
