Self Immolation

The kings are dying,
all the big stone gods are crumbling down
dissolving in water with failed kidneys and livers
from drinking and smoking
and laughing and fighting and fucking.
and words
far, far too many words.
The kind of words that won’t ever stop coming.
Until it all stops for good.

So for a change, I’m going to start a fire
something that will burn though this dark night
and take off my fingerprints
so that when I go back to you old house
and creep into your bedroom at night
cupping my hand just to feel once more
your quickly beating heart
you’ll never know I was there.

This is what fire
unlike water
can do.

And like the Old Believers
I’ll go out with a fire burst
a hot red cloud, like a hurricane
swirling from my belly.
A great cape of disappearance
a shrill howl.

Just me and the great Hercules
building our own funeral pyres.
All my hair snuffed out,
my skin blackened and curling like ribbon,
my bones just gravel.
This body is all that I have, all that any of us
are ever going to get.

So maybe we should all go together, like Frankenstein
before we realize that nothing is going to be the same.
Before we fall back into acceptance and can no longer marvel over the first snowfall,
over the velvet softness that comes before the seizure,
over the hiccup and scratch of slave chants on record.

We’ll smell that great wood burn
and we’ll leap for it.
I will call you Sati
and you will fall with unstoppable grace into the fire.
And the whole world will fall in love with you
over and over
again.