Another Mind Open

There was a fire where smoke gathered
and danced like rivers without gravity
to the rattle of drums.

Sometimes I would look inside the smoke
but it curled away and covered itself
with a cloak so opaque I could only cry.
It became the mask of its consumption.
The dream of its new life.
The victorious skin always changing
yet everlasting.

There was a fire last night
that proclaimed news of a newer testament
that drinks tears, lies, vile words, even
the deep fears that linger underneath
the turncoat.

I usually lurch away when it calls.
To me, it burns too cold
like a skinwalker lost in a body
devoured by time.
Sometimes I would dream it alive
and it would blaze--a vibrant sun--
more durable than a grave.

In times of stillness
it would speak like a codicil of some lidless dream
that words could not preserve.
"The time has come to lift your gaze
from the fire's brightness
and cast shadows of your own."
The words would echo into oblivion
like stars lost in the swell of the sun's awakening.

In these flames I see my
consumption fit and proper.
In its smoke
I am stored away like so many jars
in a broom closet.
Waiting to flee.
Drawing my feet to oppose the floor.
Struggling to reach the door inside these jars
of sealed air.

Stories escape the writer's hand
and pursue me as though I alone held their vigil.
Their very soul.

When indeed these stories have never been told.
They have never found words
to hold though they ceaselessly try.

Fires blind nature.
They invest their life in her death.
But the end is always beginning
toward another end.
And the dreams of the untold
are always pursuing another mouth,
another hand,
another mind open.

Sometimes I look to the errant expression of hope,
and ask it to bring its flames deeper into my heart.
To burn a clear sense of purpose.
To burn away the fool's crevice
and enshroud me in its skin of smoke.

Sometimes I offer myself to these flames
and know they listen.
Devising my world.
Reality coalesces around their finery
like a tower of glass enclothes a shell of steel.

Sometimes I feel the flames send me
words, notes, tones.
Enchantment.
Products of another kind.
Tiny crucibles of earth that burn so brightly
they can blind the sun's creatures of whimsy.

And sometimes, without even thinking,
I peek into these flames
when the smoke peels away for an instant.
There, behind the mask,
is my future.
Our future.
The future.
The present in another world.
Calling out for another mouth,
another hand,
another mind open.