🔥. 🔥 🔥.
The Poppy in the fire does not bloom,
it opens.
It opens like a mouth that has been waiting
for centuries to speak a name,
sacred.
Its milk runs but is slow.
Its red is quiet.
I drink and the world lowers its voice,
while my thoughts become loud.
My eyes grow warm,
consumed,
heavy as velvet curtains.
The room thickens.
Time sits down and stops pretending to move.
Hours pass like black animals
lying very still on the floor.
I do not step over them.
I lie among them.
I become one of them,
I become
Then, with exhale,
the room returns to me,
not as memory,
but as repetition, in blissful haze.
Yellow cloth.
A body reclining.
A pipe breathing smoke.
Fire held upright by a trembling wick,
nervous, devout, alive.
The sun is gone.
No butterflies of colour on the wall.
Only smoke now lifts
blue, slow, patient, wholesome,
intentional,
writing its loops and sentences
in shared sky,
and forgetting them halfway through.
I take the pipe, breathing,
Or the pipe takes me.
Breath becomes my ceremony.
Breath becomes a story.
Breath becomes law.
The same daze arrives, unto all
obedient, familiar, assuming
like a servant who knows the house better than I do, it knows.
The dream keeps to the limits of the day at first,
faithful, polite,
a mirror repeating gestures
until repetition itself breaks open.
I am buried in cushions,
soft as a grave that loves me.
I lean back and watch the smoke
rise and rise, patterns dancing
until it forgets its own beginning
and becomes cloud.
My eyes climb to the ceiling.
Black, Eternal
Gold-patterned.
Patient.
I stare, off into the distance.
I stare until the staring changes it.
Until the black grows tired of being black.
Until blue leaks through like confession, bleeding into each other.
It is the blue of night’s skirts,
heavy, ceremonial, final.
I speak to it, foolishly.
It answers by becoming more blue.
Stars open their eyes.
Their lashes stretch into the room,
thin, gold, impossible.
Light spills everywhere radiantly
prismatic, singing,
too much and not enough,
consuming, becoming.
The beams of the house turn transparent for a moment.
I see the rafters and the memories.
I see the bones and the scars.
I understand that everything is held up
by something willing to be seen.
Doubt arrives, late and weak.
Suspicion flickers.
But belief is easier now.
Belief is warm.
Belief explains itself,
Belief is simple.
A magician appears briefly
because I think of him.
That is how doors work now.
That is how logic walks
backwards, smiling, stumbling inward.
His eyes burn with unknown depth.
They grow.
They grow until they are shields,
heated red in a golden furnace.
The rest of him dissolves,
ash falling into shadow,
shadows falling into blackness,
until only seeing remains
two circles of fire
staring me open.
Heat moves through me.
Veils of flame.
Threads of light.
Wires entering my skin
and rooting there,
making me glow from the inside
like a wick suddenly burst into flame and that has learned its purpose.
I am walking.
I am not moving.
I am asleep.
I am awake.
I am in the dream
and the dream is using me
to look at itself.
White flakes drift downward.
Slow.
Deliberate.
Feathers?
Wool?
Fragments of a dove that forgot its body?
starlight hues ?
A voice bends into my ear
and breaks the air:
They are spirits.
The white becomes figures.
Veiled.
Ascending.
Spiraling upward
like breath learning to pray.
They pass her
the girl sitting at the edge of the ceiling,
bare feet swinging,
looking to the sky,
striking heaven’s wall with impatience.
Her feet are pale, transparent,
too beautiful for endurance.
They ask her to come.
Sit closer,
She refuses.
She wants time.
Not stars.
Not eternity.
Six more months of touch,
of hunger,
of light on skin.
She looks at me.
I am already moving.
My soul lifts its arms.
My wings are made of wanting.
A door waits.
Bronze, copper and silver
Half-open.
It knows me.
The black city receives me
without surprise.
A lamp burns with borrowed light.
A body lies still,
waxen, holy,
hands crossed like a promise kept too long.
Only the mouth is alive.
Only the mouth remembers warmth.
I bend.
I kiss.
Life answers.
The kiss is returned
with fire,
with hunger,
with impossible insistence.
There is a gap here.
There must be.
No dream allows passage
without erasure.
I return somehow
on smoke,
on wing,
on nothing,
my return.
The room again.
The furniture faithful.
The fire still listening.
A bell rings.
She enters.
White dress flowing soft.
Black cape.
Many faces passing through her face
like shadows testing mirrors.
She stands.
She shines.
She asks her name.
I give it to her,
beauty.
She sings.
She sings in verses too beautiful for memory.
She sings in music that grows wings.
She sings six months of life
into my mouth,
into my hands,
into my chest.
I answer her before she speaks.
We are transparent now.
We read each other like open flames.
The ecstasy rises.
It would have burned the house
if not for fur,
rough and alive,
brushing my face.
Morning breaks the spell gently,
like a hand on a shoulder.
The poppy closes.
The fire dies back into itself.
The story loosens its grip.
But it does not leave.
It waits.
In ash.
In smoke.
In the next breath
that forgets to belong to me.