and here, hood singes the nye alive;
bolded embers setting bushes ablaze,
splaying thermals across crystal sands in overdrive.

three hundred miles away, the strip marvels at atomic rays
of fiasco light: denizens of sin shaking seismic in their boots, westerly winds carrying fallout to unbeknownst breadthways.

back in the nye, i holds a platter of fruits.
mouth unlocked, howling at detonated disaster
as it pyres a sky only man can constitute.

and the fruits, the fruits, oh, how they rot and molder—
plums and oranges molting as conduction collapses darkness.
a scream on deaf ears, a priestess’s prophecies passed over.

night reshapes desert into a mourner’s starkness.
i falls to her knees and laughs and laughs;
plums and oranges rolling every which way with curtness

so slick. sands ask i for autograph.
i rips out their tongue, scribbles into dust,
writes: oh, my apollo, behold your wasted calves.

and here, i poses question
atop radius of soon-to-be-slighted earth. i kisses
your hands and asks: do you ever think about heaven?

do you ever think pastors and pulpits
got it right? is there a chance this plutonium
pit might ignite and send us up to bliss

or below like the scum
they’ve claimed us to be? do you ever think,
either way, we take these memories, these phantom

engrams of beauty inked
onto our souls? i’s asking if you think this test
might be the one to rescue us. in a blink,

one-point sullies subject;
proves itself fifty-thousand times
over—blue flames flying to crest

a night candled into daylight. soldiers
dashing to safety, abandoning
their unlucky, skin-bare brothers

as the ever-king of swing
saturates the air with a tempo
that knows no suffering,

knows nothing of answers that grow
beyond the measure
of a light show.

and here, i admits i’s always loved
the art of fire. loved to witness wick
and wood seared black. charred

as a child, i’s magical digits
flicked through candle flames.
unburnt, i thought i’self mage.

tricking the mind through mortality unlearned,
unrepentant, unattended. fingertips
stovetop-warm and itching to spark, i yearned

for chaos incarnate whenever an ember
clipped carbon enough to kindle reaction.
the secret? speed. a fretless inertia that whips

exposure into an explicit infinite.
a reminder that harm normally
follows the easiest mark, the stillest

duck, the i turned doe
in the light of
combustion. a fertility

of ruin creating new fortune
from fuel. the power of cosmic
order in the palm of i’s dumb-

struck hand, human after all.