There’s that smell of smoke again
my neighbor burning leaves across the lot,
     brown leaves worthy of being burned simply because they fell
(and because they’ll rot his idea of a yard).
And it’s brown to black and then gray
     as all things fall.

And there is the sound of smoke, too
wheezing over the t.v. and radio.
Smoke and sirens (both mythical and mechanical)
    as if humanity’s a ribbon caught in a blaze.
Half the globe is burning to be free
        waking to turn the light of the sun into the sugar of their lives.
And the other half is snoring through the haze.
     Generations snoring for generations
fanning the flames
  as they wonder why they burn.

     Looking up I see with a Mover’s clarity
this smoke that blinds the sky
       stings our lives.
  And maybe that’s why they burn,
(this smoke that rises from the hillsides of history)
    to block out the sun,
to make men crazy with a human eclipse
with carbon
   because the fire inside them won’t let those free blue eyes
drift by without this little scarification of smoke.
A gray river flowing toward the sky
              for the live and let die.
  
         This smoke that fills my mouth,
that leaves its bitterness in me,
    does it burn dreams as it burns through flesh?
Will it burn all the way to the seed?
We wonder whether dreams shrivel or if they explode
    like something thawed on its way to the sun.
            Or do they, as the expression goes, simply go up in smoke?
like some slippery eel disappeared in the deep deep dark.
   Do we smoke our dreams from two ends like a hapless fiend
or sip them with precious small breaths to drag out our sunsets?
      When the smoke is all gone
do we see the hoax of hoaxes?
  Or do we choke to death?