I'm in a poetry class

...and so life has meaning. My absence (from vomiting poems on the internet) is largely attributed to all the theory I've had to ingest recently. Reading brilliant work & its criticism, not being as brilliant... You know.

In any case, I'm turning in this to my class tomorrow. The assignment is an imitation of Frank Bidart (further proof that the best poets are gay, lonely, longing). His work can be on the creepy side, which is why I chose to write about something so awful as asphyxiation.
(P.S. I'm having indentation issues. Does anyone know how to indent stuff on this website??)

Perfect limbs won’t peel away

Look at you – gold and whole, your painted,
impenetrable pores thigh eyelids lips breasts hipbone

roast in stage light. Gold dancer,

your chest swells. You’d scrape your shell
off to sawdust, the lungs that sag

like rotting wood under the weight

of skin you writhe to relinquish.
I watch your gibbet-jerks; you twitch
___________________________and twirl and twirl and twirl

Perfect limbs won’t peel away

like the bird that careens, bright in sun,

between flying and falling as breath dies in it
like the bird watched by the creature

watching in the dark, the dark

creature that craves the dancer,
craves bright surface and flare of the beauty

I’ve made of you; your skin
shut like an eye; your painted,

perfect limbs can’t peel away. Trapped, shine, MINE.