The fires burn each day and night
Of my wretched slogging life
By the yellow river's edge
Where the steaming air is sucked away
Through bullying gravity's dull torn web.
Here the proffered bodies dissolve quickly
As bitter ash rises silent
To taint the vacant sky all round.
We mourn not for what we cannot help.
We fear not that which cannot be halted.
But as the endless guided trundles rock and sway
Down the muddy trail to the sunken pyres
We dare not look about at what is outside our path.
For there might be a life unchecked,
A hope that has not died,
A soul overlooked by numbing loss
With vision still clear and broad
Enough to see beyond the river bank
To dream of a life escaping pain,
A butterfly lifted in the blue breeze.
We the toilers of this realm
Who know no such thing
Think joy a naïve wish
That the day’s next stack of fuel
Will consume in a foggy nacreous gasp of smoke.
Heaven, of course, is the aim
In these rituals of sickness and death.
Greasy bodies hiss and spit like bacon strips on iron
While we bruised laborers nurse the embers bright
Whose fiery blasts propel souls to their final state
Toward Heaven's sacred halls of golden light.
I have yet to see but spark and ash arising from the flames.
Perhaps my eyes are too slow to catch the release
Of these ethereal selves as they escape their blazing homes.
Mine are better tuned to view my maundering partners
Nearby who only know heat is their work
And who only see imagined spirits as roaming midnight frights.
So as I turn my self toward home
And respite from this day of dread,
I plan a meal to sooth my inner pangs
And then to dreams of cool blue skies and soaring sprites
Where no longer are bodies fuel
And death is but a cooling of the flame.
DoubleSpeak 