People walk down the street in flames,
some of them flickering merrily
like the heads of Swedish girls, some of them
being consumed like blazing monks,
but all of them hoping for wind enough
to spread their flames to someone else. A couple
sits in a bright red restaurant booth,
smoke curling out of their ears. They’re thinking
of how they’ll climb into bed and blow each other
alight. Preachers fire up their congregations,
who throw themselves like logs on the holy hearth,
which seems somehow to complement
the ancient English belief that the forces of darkness
are summoned to work one’s will by the screams
of roasting cats. Fitness nazis will tell you
you’re most alive when you can feel the burn.
Maybe that’s because there’s no such thing
as unburning. To watch a flame is to witness
the irreversible pouring forth
of that weird untouchable essence that can’t be
stuffed back in once it’s out. In the 1700’s,
they called it phlogiston and believed
that the blackened calx it left behind
was a flammable object’s truest, purest form,
which sounds about as ridiculous
as trying to tell my kids what’s burning
away from me, a little bit more each day,
and what they’ll be left with after it’s gone.