where smokes, there fires

if at the time I had known that I were
standing in the smoke of the last burning square of my life,
enveloped like a letter addressed to an author-unwary
number on a gutted street, my skin inked but enclosed in
the thinnest tomb by the gravedigger and his hopes of undeath,
I might have found cause for greater ceremony, a road sign for my
jigsaw memory as if this one of thousands were worth more alone
than any other evening shivering on a broken-code porch,
watching the Star sail across a city-swamped sky.

trumpets were not even muted as no labored air moved
through rusted pipes that night; that was saved for an
abandoned morning as streets passed beneath soles with
a cry for (un)black-market organs or a worthwhile cough
-in for the stained rejection. it was there I met penultimate finality,
saving those shaped figures for the eves of rest.

to put a stop, a full severing of the intake on this
carcinogen of conscience, that would
take something/where/one more than a hack and slash
morning stomp along the city streets so choked with
my lung bane’s cousin. that would take me on capital-bound
roads, measuring those lines with time and citations but the worth
is a simple fact as knowing all smoke is carried away in the wind.

funny how basking in the glow of a fumeless fire I
still see that flaming geometry as something always
to fall back into. after a Greek’s misplaced memorial and a war
with neighborhood bears (maybe an extended absence
from a central-state heart) after rounds of duetted “Niki!” echoing
off ancient cave walls; the more victorious voices that make
this chorus will cut the
aural force smaller and thinner, a shade of song slipping into
the nothingness of a hibernation,
of a home. a celebration had, but a prize forgotten, and yet
that ember still glows so bright when surrounded by the dark of
those deep belly caverns.

I was always good at this math, the measuring of shapes
only just seen and yet unassumed; assigning numerical order to an otherwise
unrealized length of side or of time or of anything with the dimension
and sentience to stretch itself away from me. I was always good at figuring
just how far away I could get.

but that being the physical, the solid, measurement is an actual
visibility and a universal figure, there are other dimensions
of length or of side or of time without such civility.
it is that not found in any classroom or chalkboard,
but in the weight of the ink on the page that I
find myself most curious to measure. height and width
come along with written language as essential
factors, yet the third
and undeniable dimension of scripted message and meaning is
one without number, label or symbol and begs to question: How
can a pulse onto paper be anything but reflected when the third
dimension is anything but deep?

the course taken when weighing the smoke of inked incineration
is too common and too folly a path for us distance runners. measuring
is the everyday of our bodies and the mind is hardly nature’s perpetual motion
machine, there is nothing left for the conceptual starter. one must
be diligent to the distance of body from body, from home,
and cannot stray into how deep the visualized folds of a tarless
brain now scar.

it’s this assiduousness that drives writer from writing, runner from running,
body from body. it’s the loyalty to the blind obedience that
makes dogs of us all, mouths slack and tongues loose, wagging we wag. a heaving
chest carries the weight of shaped math and the curves of a
sputtering starter heart, beats like footheels on asphalt all cracks and steam,
the breadth of a city as the breath of a man.