In a year (and half)
of fire
we learn a list of items
equally quotidian
and flammable:
Houses ~ Seasons ~ Continents
Small towns ~ Ancient forests ~ Coastal cities
Skin ~ Bone ~ Human tissue
Cop cars ~ Police stations
And the department stores
whose stocks of joy
grow in inverse proportion
to our despair.
The flame’s
atomic particle,
has solved the riddle
moving between the poles:
word to page / page to word
books within worlds and worlds within books
creative/destruction // destructive/creativity
Somehow … over the fiberglass and rubber … it taught us the invocation
of a history that refuses
to un-exist
even as records turn to ash:
If we must live our lives through fire,
let it be the kind
that tears through the faceless phalanx
that surrounds every sanctuary.
The kind that can incinerate hoards of gold
but spares every library,
dodge fields of rice
while aiming for army barracks,
obliterate cages
and warm
the most derelict rooms.
Let this fire
burn for every stinking pig
who might
in the slightest chance
think a life is theirs for the taking.
May it destroy
their name in front of them,
and the memory
that they were anything other
than the flotsam of a dark age.
Image from the Born Again Labor Museum.
