The heat of summer wraps around the marred boy like a cloak,
as good a disguise as any from a family living without love
better perhaps than even a kiss from a man, or the shape of a dog.
And as the dead heat of July stretches into days each the same,
then now not even Muggle girls, half-naked like his love’s half-blood,
can make him feel more human, or less wrapped in-between.

Since eleven, summers have felt only like school’s in-between,
and the marred boy longs for the days cold enough for a cloak.
Lately, maybe always, his mother’s concerns come back to blood,
and the defiant boy wants it to end, wants to leave and to love
his other stained boy, the other who will never be the same.
He’s tired of the heat, and how he spends the days and nights as a dog.

As the heat drags on, he is beginning to feel less human, more dog,
The marred boy’s days only widen his sense of in-between.
He thinks he should find who he’ll know feels the same,
He leaves, wearing his heart pinned on the outside of his cloak.
Looking for another stained boy, another person to love,
and his mother closes the door on him, and he on his blood.

The stained boy’s shirts are all slick with his own blood,
and the summers are long without the help of his dog.
He’s afraid of himself, afraid of the marred boy’s love,
both of them desperately stained and in-between
The marred boy and the stained, he means, as they lie under his cloak,
but in the end, he knows they’re not too far from the same.

The marred wants to run after his love, say that they are the same
The stained is afraid of himself as he sees his lover’s blood.
When, late summer, the stained boy leaves suddenly in the swish of a cloak,
the heat encases them both and they are both empty, and both dogs
Their stains will come free, he murmurs, their stains are just love,
Until they remember that they are wrapped into animals, in-between.

The marred boy’s safety net is gone, there is nothing between
After they can taste that night instead of each other there is nothing the same -
What does it feel like, in the end, to fall out of love?
It feels like the taste in their mouth of Halloween, of their best friend’s blood.
the loss of his love, his life, and his tears fall as he turns into a dog.
It feels like the stained boy leaving suddenly in the swish of a cloak.

Twelve years later, the dog days of summer are just the same
as the marred boy lies in-between the sheets of Azkaban, planning for blood,
listening for the rat’s cloak. Listening for the return of the stained boy’s love.