The Fire Cycle
BY ZACHARY SCHOMBURG
There are trees and they are on fire. There are hummingbirds and they are on fire. There are graves and they are on fire and the things coming out of the graves are on fire. The house you grew up in is on fire. There is a gigantic trebuchet on fire on the edge of a crater and the crater is on fire. There is a complex system of tunnels deep underneath the surface with only one entrance and one exit and the entire system is filled with fire. There is a wooden cage we’re trapped in, too large to see, and it is on fire. There are jaguars on fire. Wolves. Spiders. Wolf-spiders on fire. If there were people. If our fathers were alive. If we had a daughter. Fire to the edges. Fire in the river beds. Fire between the mattresses of the bed you were born in. Fire in your mother’s belly. There is a little boy wearing a fire shirt holding a baby lamb. There is a little girl in a fire skirt asking if she can ride the baby lamb like a horse. There is you on top of me with thighs of fire while a hot red fog hovers in your hair. There is me on top of you wearing a fire shirt and then pulling the fire shirt over my head and tossing it like a fireball through the fog at a new kind of dinosaur. There are meteorites disintegrating in the atmosphere just a few thousand feet above us and tiny fireballs are falling down around us, pooling around us, forming a kind of fire lake which then forms a kind of fire cloud. There is this feeling I get when I am with you. There is our future house burning like a star on the hill. There is our dark flickering shadow. There is my hand on fire in your hand on fire, my body on fire above your body on fire, our tongues made of ash. We are rocks on a distant and uninhabitable planet. We have our whole life ahead of us.

The decoy hearts sit in the ribcage like the original heart did and gives of the persona of originality. A Poser, as another might call it.
Like doll’s eyes, lifeless but giving off the idea of sight.

Soon it becomes decoy, dating decoy, and then they get married and they sit in the back of the car staring straight ahead at..
What they wish they could have had and they hold hands, but it is not what they think it should be.

The hand doesn’t fit quite right.


When you love someone else enough
They take your heart and run with it and leave behind the decoy.
The decoy just beats blood.

It does not race or flutter. It does not even break.


There is a gap in my hand where your fingers used to fit, and when the new boy holds my hand it’s clumsy and unfamiliar.
I wish he drank coffee and read books translated a thousand times over.

He wishes I would wipe my make up off and show him my heart.

There is a void inside you now that you do not understand, it is filled with the cracking of sticks and the smell of his old gym socks.

The weather is 62 and sunny there, he always told you he would start running, much like you would give up smoking and ripped up tights.
He thought it was disgusting how your lipstick stained his coffee cups.


You found his old hairbrush with hairs still attached, and used toothbrush laying on the floor near your lipstick stained shot glass.
Reminisce you can’t return.



He always smelled like after the down pour, after all the yelling is done,
When you sit in a chair and notice all the cracks in the celing, the bright green light of the computer charger, and you think to yourself, how bad of a person you must be.

Then he disappears to go running maybe, or because it was too hard to handle the way your sunglasses cluttered his nightstand,

Or maybe because you showed him who he really was, the reality of an imperfect being,

Through my mother’s thinning hair,
I see her scalp,
and I realize that I don’t know her at all.


While I was sitting on my father’s lap he turned the cube over and over in my hands, intertwined with my fingers, my palms already marked with stress lines. They buried my life line. I told him how I could not line up the colors, the way they’re supposed to be much like I cannot line up when my parents eyes meet.




I cannot line up with your footsteps or the cracks in the pavement, you are far ahead of me in life, in thought.

I am trailing behind.


One night you ran up the hill to the park and left me behind in the darkness to stare at invisible trees, and all I could think was could you hear my voice in your head calling you back into alignment wit me.

I drink coffee
out of the mug i never gave you.

......

just to spite you.

The boy with blue hair sits in a bar
He has been drinking since four o’clock.
He stares at the water stain on the bar that his glass left behind.

Lovers are everywhere, he thinks to himself, leaving me
Watching me, pitying me. They are angry that I did not bring another to this place
To fall on, to kiss.
He looks around, desperate to find someone to regret in the morning.

There is no one.
He walks home, he calls a friend to tell them of his
Loneliness.
He tells them he understands now how it feels to walk among lovers.

II.
The friend has been numb for months, but does not want to tell her friend that just because you have a love does not mean,
You feel it.
When you love someone else enough they take your feelings too.
They take your heart and run with it and leave behind the decoy.
The decoy just beats blood.

It does not race or flutter. It does not even break.

III.
The boy does not realize he is jealous of people who do not love each other.

IV.
The decoy hearts sit in the ribcage like the original heart did and give of the persona of originality. A Poser, as another might call it.
Like doll’s eyes, lifeless but giving off the idea of sight.

Soon it becomes decoy, dating decoy, and then they get married and they sit in the back of the car staring straight ahead at..
What they wish they could have had and they hold hands, but it is not what they think it should be.

The hand doesn’t fit quite right.

V.
The boy wanders through town to another friends house, sleeps with him, wakes up to the sound of…
A general heartbeat.

(This poem is in progress, i'll take any suggestions on it)



He has a three legged cat that hops through the room,
and he tastes like *** a lot of the time.


I dreamt about an old lover the other night,
He held my waste tightly while I searched for…

You.

But I wasn’t looking for you human form,
Only the distraction
Of another’s scent,
The warm embrace of someone who uses the word ‘love’ without
Knowing its power.


I want to walk on the street again where the old church and courthouse are,
Sipping coffee and wearing torn tights, fashionably ripped I’d tell my mother, when she tried to throw them away and wash my jeans too much.
They faded, as did our snow tracks, and the areas we slipped on ice are melted now.
To ant covered grass.

Loud crowded bars are now, only a memory to me and and you’re messy room where all my belongings are lost, is owned by another now.
They do not know whose memories are stored there.


I go in and out of numbness like of the beeping of a heart monitor.

---alive---wondering------alive-----wondering—FEELING----getupw­orkgotobedwriteitdown---


I am not lost like I always thought I would be,

It is more like the times, I pretended to sleep next to you but was really listening to you breath.