she danced with Death,
a debutante who closed her eyes
and saw the cotillion
under a dimly lit chandelier
with no grand decor
and otherwise empty
save the hardwood floor that
heard the click-clack of bones
fill a ballroom in utter calamity,
but I think she likes it,
there on the crevasse
believing that death
might give her some pass
to keep click-clacking in chaotic
catastrophe:

but she is no princess in poetic song,
and the ballroom she dreams
and the white waltz she’s on
is a blacktop, a streetlamp,
and the trash she calls home,
and she is no heroine
to be written in poem
without glorified gravity that
she should not doubt:
that Death, he shall come
not to dance, nor to shout
but to quietly take
that which she lives without –
a sacred call she forsakes,
a love we’ll sadly recount.