Arson

My hands smell like fire

My lungs like smoke

Within me lies valleys of gray ash and all the words we ever spoke

If I could be fully flammable, 
ignited in red against the summer sky
Maybe then I'd be empty enough
Empty enough, to fly 

I've all this chatter, city voices sounding in my head

Like rubbish upon a wind blown street 

Like overhearing all the gossip that's ever been said

It blows and billows around within me 

And I am sorry from it 

Smudged in soot and ash

like a dirty, discharged bullet 

It's beneath my fingernails and behind my ears, 

the grime of subway dirt

It's in my stomach 

and beneath the freckled front

of all the unspoken hurt 

It's tabloid headlines

Facebook posts 

It's voices for the shouting and voices for the ghosts 

I wish to be clean

I wish to be whole 

again unbroken 
from my tumbling with the world 

I yearn for fire. 

The absolute purge 

Nothing left but the stuff 

made of metal and of bone 

Fire licking hungrily at the edges of the pages, 

Eating at the ink stained words

Tasting the edges of the flimsy wooden walls,
Climbing ever higher, ever higher
the sky, the only thing left to fall.

I am thankful for the old leaning barn within me, which used to house my dreams, 

it's all up in flames tonight 

The wood giving way, achingly, to ash

But somewhere inside I am glad

My dreams weren't meant for prisoners my soul not tied to the unspoken secrets of the past

I am thankful for this wildfire 

laying waste to my ground

I am thankful for the trees that have been yearning to be burned, their tops alight with flames. 

I am thankful for the yellow grass, 

dry and brittle, 

igniting like matches with a hiss and a sizzle and a pop 

In the morning I will be just ash. 

Gray and fine and everywhere

drifting over the church yard wall, 

and kissing the bumble bees good morning from the lips of a trembling rose.

But this loss is a new kind of life. 

My old is gone, released back into the light, 

to float up and bond with the sun. 

And I am left, 

my skin swept clean by the hurricane 

that shakes me. 

My face windswept and no longer wet

My house is bare. 

My fields empty,

the ground will be ready 

to be planted soon

No more tall grass to wade through. 

Just the clean, sweet expanse of emptiness. 

I wonder how long we've got, the emptiness and I.