“not a first”

Beneath your pillow, there is a fire. There is a bridge. There is a cord. There is a home en flambe. There is a pacing body. There is a reminder that some humans don’t want to be found. There is a box shaped as a womb beneath your bed and there are pieces of the men and women you wandered in. There is a train ride. There is a passport with tattoos which match another’s. There is a tribal marking on right arm beneath the bent above the twitch. There is a rolodex of sexual awakenings. There is a flirtatious gathering of limbs on a rooftop before a month chimes closed as hips test how shatterproof they can be. Between your fingers, there are strings. There is noise. There is a whisper of callus. There is projectile love detonated on a sunday with grass stains and generator fumes. There is a jump but somewhere out there a woman with earth-drenched hair holds your neck and your shoulders and massages the distance between each muscle. This woman gathers you up like a bundle of firewood and beneath the sun, water. And above the water, ice. Some ways to heal can be from taking the you away. Some ways to move on can be found in envelopes or ghost letters lit up by neon magic wand. Beneath your home is an earthworm. Or many. And bones and bugs and blood. You can dig or you can remain up here. Up top where the living are. Are you living. Are you where. Are you up.

body is a fireplace for rummaging ashes

There is a strange aroma that arises with each burn. And nothing just disappears. Because if you look within the crumbles of fire, you will see each woman devoured through external glances, the men, the books, the meals, the water, the leaves, the mountains, the spices, the bedframes, the silence, the sliced animals, the musculature of eardrums, the roads.

Sky is a cannibal. And the sun is a combustion of yesterday and the decades that wait backstage. Are fingernails flammable. Is the belt you whip your pages with fire-proof.

Save the world one spit at a time. Hoard saliva as though it is a remedy. When you see something worthy of keeping, hiss the liquids off your tongue and gyrate to the sizzle.

Not everything is a metaphor for something else. Sometimes a fire is just for warmth or a need to extinguish evidence of life.

When one sets a body on fire, the only thing left are the bones, hinting toward the remains of existence.