i am on fire.
i am burning and your sweat would put me out but you’re all dried up.
there is nothing flowing from you, you are not a fountain,
at least not my fountain, and towards the end embers were all i could get.

i am on fire and there is nothing to do about it by myself.
i am tired of this temperature because it is sad when you are alone,
and the sad flames lick through the sad wind,
a sad bird flies through the air
and i can’t tell if it is red or if it’s on fire, too.

i felt the end like you feel a house burning down.
everything you had, everything you know, was in that space
and it is crumbling.
they say they’re just things, that stuff is stuff,
but no one considers any sentimental value. it would’ve happened
eventually they say,
but ash is to ashes like dust is to your dirt filled bones,
your femurs were tephra made pillars, i just wanted you to erupt for me.
to buckle at your patellas
for your joints to shake
you never understood how much heart i had in volcanos.
you never got that my ribs rumbled,
that the pressure built in my chest until love was a lava flow,
the quick kind that destroys everything around you.
you never understood so when i offered you myself,
you offered me a cracked hip bone and instead of marrow my lips found cinder.

do you know what charred bone tastes like?
have you ever swallowed chalk before?

from before the very beginning i felt your heat
and when i finally let it wash over me i was unprepared.
you torched my skin and left it, and the thing about burn scars
is they’re always cold to the touch.
it was your touch, it was your flaming fingers razing my throat,
your mouth was a match striking sparks against phosphorous skin,
when the place between the cinders became an incinerator,
the flashpoint
and the end.
we discovered that you cannot wash the smell of smoke from your hands…
that your spine will struggle to realign itself,
once it melted to another person.
the joints in my elbows were adjusted to fit you,
i thought it no coincidence that my mandible fit between your occipital and clavicle,
the curve to your ilium, the hollow just beneath your sternum
on every place of you there was a fire pit for me.
there were things to scald away, and i scorched the plans to the ground.
ashes to ashes.
but then no more were your bones.
that sad wind came, and swept you up, and the vortex it left sucked me down.
with a final flash
and too many possibilities
for what smothered that fire,
you were gone.

sometimes you have to burn out
before you can begin again.