The spiritual journey of a firefly

Sometimes I feel like being the spark that spontaneously combusts this pretentious fucking archival in its bear-rug adjacent easy chair, burning it as if the vengeful payback scheme of the nearby crackling fire log in the place.

But sometimes I am the flesh, and to do such a thing would surely, at some point or other, hurt like hell.

And also sometimes I am the berm of the boat that crosses a distinctly magma-filled river in the hell Blake wrote so fondly of in his marriage vows. So in those instances the pain, like hell, would be a necessity.

A burden is sometimes a necessity. Duplicity comes to be thematic in this way, like thread and cowhide.

Why cowhide, though--I don't fucking know, ask the Hindus. It's their animal, after all, and my late aunt Louise knew about the cows and one time when she slept on the pullout couch in our living room she and my father watched Planet of the Apes and laughed. My father will never be that happy again in his life. In many ways, neither will I.

When you lose someone, you are not the same person. So naturally, when my father changed, I had to change also, or be left behind a bastard.

To spontaneously combust these words, then, or rather, not spontaneously but meticulously planned, would be a great relief as they would then not ultimately lead to the core of my behaviors, my fears and my painful memories, opening my chest like a clam shell for dirty fingers to shovel...

But I cannot. Because while sometimes I am a can of oil and a match having conversation with a Buddhist monk, while sometimes I am the flesh of the monk, and other times I part the river Styx with my teeth, I always am the ink of the words. To write of the combustion, then, is to solidify my being. The ink which coats the idea is non-flammable, though the idea itself still burns.

Thus if you look closely you will see the glow of my fucking heart.