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Notes From The Newgate Calendar
Those two?---theirs was a sin not discharged in the confessional.
They murdered a young adolescent man for his beauty
(long-haired, slender, a dancer), and because of his homosexual
desire, They believed it was their religious and social duty:
to smash many of his bones; his suffering body, badly mangled.
They deserved a most excruciating, even terrifying, end
to their foolery. The hangman, himself---aggravated
by their lack of even a shred of remorse, for such cruelty,
deliberately but surreptitiously miscalculated
the rope's length for the drop: they slowly strangled
(their purpled faces and blackened tongues evidenced their agony).
His work done, the hangman returned home to his own boyfriend---
a lad just out of Cambridge---delicate and studious,
whose attraction to his older lover is very obvious.
Starward
