are rising, like the warm air.
Orange stair, flickering over the shutters – my four candles
create the passage to the up-there dark.

Moniker for fire
is light, in polarity with my dashing shadow,
forms so flesh & winding,
we screw as octopuses latched in combat,
flashing like camera bulbs.

Or so I think. I am alone in my loft, have no nemesis to speak of.
Have a lover & perhaps another far beyond the sierra,
sketch my cold vanities on paper, heat
these anemic hands on a coffee mug

no different. I repeat. No different than the individuals
stacked inside this building, having sex
with shades, reeling in the cannonballs of flames, holding
stretched braids of time
that have woven down from their wild brains.

We could gather, forty some people in a small room
though cramped it would be, shoulder to shoulder, back to front,
we would get closer in no time at all,
our braids might tangle –
no,
we can’t have that.

The rivers of my balcony, the black casting
the nonreflective mirrors of the trees,
the Quaker Oats atop my cupboard a stoutly
queer outline of no color & concave shape
(it bends in, how strange) the night caves in
all objects, narration turns towards the bones

dig delve deep. Quietly in the numbing virtue of the late hours
I have begun a descent. Most notable

for a poem

that started

with a stairway.