the burner

Maybe we will meet one day, some funny bumping into, some meeting of the minds. Maybe I will greet you with a wave. A flailing to flag down your focus. A combination of luck and etiquette, just to make a place for me to be. An exchange of names, a flurry of intermingled hands and hi how are yas, identities narrowed down and suspicions confirmed. It looks like we’re really getting somewhere, should the whenever ever arrives. Until then, these are the flowers meant for the unmarked. All the days that never find us. All the worlds that go without.

The words go on, by virtue of their virulence. They clot up the conversation because they make you say them. Live forever by being the seeds of senselessness, tethered deep in the abstraction and all those slippery slopes borne of ten thousand antecedent tales scratching at the back of ancestral skulls. The magic we spit and preach, the gibbering geysers of belief pointing at doors that everyone has to knock on. The words want to take your mind by the mouthful. And the words don’t know the meaning of the word.

Messages in bottles filled with emoji thought balloons. Declarations and demands, pretty ribbons and rib cage petitions. The lullabied and the how far the mooned. The literature isn’t looking and the dull and drear I love you dears only exist if the circuits don’t short. The clutches loose and the kindling’s spent. All these at best epitaphs, tossed on top of all the play and sell. All the prayers and fan fictions left to posterity, when posterity hasn’t done a thing for anyone at all.