The choking game

Stooped over his featherweight form
One of the crowd
Rhythmically compresses the naked chest
As I stand in the doorway
Watching and thinking…
Something is terribly wrong
With a nine year old heart
Needing resuscitation,
His body statuesque on the trauma board
But for the bounce
Of each external beat,
His face serene, cherubic almost,
But for the fallen halo of red
That rings his slender neck
As a jewelry of choking tracks
From the bathroom’s continuous cloth,
Cascading from the metallic dispenser
Where he wrapped his neck
In the linen loop
To reach a nine year old nirvana
In a hanging asphyxiation —
Autoeroticism in the absence of air—
A prepubescent, orgasmic height
From which there is only descent,
A crowd that silently disperses around me,
The beloved apostle adrift
In a moment of personal apostasy
As I watch the lithe body
Limply lying, Pieta-like,
In the arms of a weeping mother.