Ask
and she’ll open her ear to you.

It’s uncomfortably dark,
and startlingly silent.

But in the darkness
you’ll see the puncture of
a cascading web of millisecond missiles.
Pleasure and pain’s
carrier pigeons
bouncing off the soft tissue
clockwork machinery.

Stare
until your eyes water,
and behind your eyelids
you see
the imprints of explosions.

Now find a switch along her insides.
You will feel a hum.

Life is not an inhale, exhale,
it’s the delicate vibration
of billions of ecosystems
destroying and multiplying.
She is destroying and multiplying.

Lay for a minute.
Watch the dome’s ceiling.
There is a pink fog
curling translucent.
She is dreaming.

You won’t understand
The silhouettes that appear.
It’s okay.
She doesn’t either.

When you are finished, stand up.
Walk around,
front and center,
to two stages
with curtains pulled shut.

It plays the scariest show of all.
You’ve seen it more times than you know
and know it better than you think.

Observe
how our two main characters,
pitted against each other from the beginning,
hold one another.

Logic and emotion.
A dangerous chemical mixture,
they produce a flame.
An ambition, a hope.

Logic and emotion,
in the hours before the curtains sweep open
entertain the possibility
of forever intertwining.

Too late.
The curtains rush open.
Our two heroes pull apart,
the flame extinguished.

She feels cold.
Not knowing why
she reaches for a match.
Something to relight it.
But never play with fire.