isn't everything just bits of matter

disguised as a desk petunia person

swirling whirling twisting turning

nothingness if not invisible energy

once life spirit vigor vitality being

passes expires extinguished stilled

all remits to indistinguishable ash

dead unimportant without breath

It was the fire that started it.

We were only its tenders, sent

to keep it alive. Nights, we feasted

on its warmth, drinking up the light—

blind to the darkness to come. They told us

the hearth is the heart where the burning lives,

and I wondered then, did we have enough

to burn? There were days,

of course, once the babies came,

no time to chop & stack the wood.

And days of lack, when, frantic to keep it

alive, I’d wildly forage for kindling: dried

leaves, old photographs, my fingers

threading for loose strands of hair. Once

I hammered a tool to keep things alight,

but instead, you found others—

carved from crooked woods, or painted

black to fool the eye. Now the dying

crackle sizzles low. Quite a hollow hush

when there’s nothing left to say,

and the sun has finally sunk,

too heavy for the cracking sky,

and the embers begin to shut their eyes—

tempted into ash.

The rain has blackened all the tree trunks, but a white face is painted on a young oak.

I almost missed it staring back at me from the wood line. Two eyes, an exaggerated nose, an idiot's toothy grin, they all follow me as I turn against the wind. I cup the Winston, and calm sanity warms my throat as I squint against wisps of rolled North Carolina gold.

It isn't really a face, I reckon. It's lichen, or moss, or some other forest growth that's had its way with the bark of some wild tree.

I lean against the wet railing of my deck. The air is thick, but cool. Soon, the sun will turn wet grass into the floor of a sauna, but for now, everything is perfectly comfortable, maybe even a little chilled.

Maybe it's just the face dropping my temperature a little.

I refuse to make eye contact. It's silly, I know, because it isn't really a face and there are no eyes. I can't shake my odd feeling about it, though. It reminds me of one of those moths that intentionally draws the eye away from important bits.

So where should I be looking, if the face is a decoy?

I chuckle, shaking my head. This place is playing tricks on me.

I drape one leg over the banister and straddle it. I don't have any patio furniture yet. It's pretty low on the priority list, since I'm still living out of cardboard boxes in the new house.

I'll go poke around the tree line when I finish this Winston.

What's the worst that could happen?

Drove through the town I grew up in

For the first time in ages

Looking for differences

Searching for changes

My childhood home burnt down

My best friends is gone too

How would you react

If there was no evidence of you

Another friends house is gone

This is feeling displacing

Like an organized effort

To remove or erase me

Dig up my dogs bones

to prove i exist

I've been here before

but its time i revist

Tangibility

Weight of existence

Liability

If this isn't reality what is this

Left behind

Rotting through

Turn to dust

Time consumes

Ashes to ashes...as they say. From ashes we arise, and to ashes we'll end up. That's not religion; that is physics.

Don't be fooled by entropy. There's more at work even at the granular levels of dissolution—smaller than the scintillas; tinier than the remnant specks; less noticeable than the crumbs that end up in food chains.

For there's data in those ashes. Carbonaceous trails. Life stories. Love stories. Entire histories. Whether buried by burning or fragmented and atomized via deterioration, we all settle onto our world as wisps. Wisps that carry the data. Data that can be read.

Perhaps one day we'll build machines that can read that data.

That's when we'll know who our deathbed-fellows are. Those progenitor ashes, from which the lives that live, laugh, love, suffer, and relate to all the other ash-bound beings on the world, come from...on the front end...

...themselves carry the data of all those before and provide the new ashes to be forged into the stuff of new lives. And their data is added to the data our own ashes will carry after our lives burn out in conflagration.

And that machine that will read the data, contained therein, will columnate, sort, and collate our otherwise tangled web whose lifelines cross not only time zones, borders, and cultures, but epochs, too. Clio's substrate of the history of all that was and all who were.

Ashes accrue. Ashes bequeath. Ashes define all that was before, all who were before, and portend who will be and who will add yet another layer of data to the planet's motes, stored deceptively under footfalls to come or along the winds.

For those who care to look beyond the false simplicity of detritus.

In however many billions of years, planet earth will cease to exist when our sun explodes. Earth won’t burn, because burning requires a time lapse, and earth itself won’t explode, at least not in the context humans are familiar with, because we will liquidate instantly, our atoms gone faster than any increment of time humanity uses currently.

It won’t be like a Tom Cruise movie or even like an atomic bomb dropping on a city. There will be no time for humans to react, to look up, because it will happen faster than any motion humans can make inherently, more quickly than blinking. You likely wouldn‘t even register the blinding light of it, because by the time the light reached your eyes, every atom that makes up your body will be obliterated, the DNA in your cells unraveling backwards, faster than the back button on your laptop when you click it repeatedly or someone making an Irish exit at a large, uncomfortable family gathering.

Ashes to ashes. In less than a nanosecond of a nanosecond of a nanosecond. You get it. You wouldn’t even turn to dust. Earth‘s life span as a planet will have been insignificant in relation to that of the universe, humanity snuffed out before the breath even reaches the candle.

Even steel will burn

twist

Even

Some say fire is a renewal

Cleansing

I say its a symptom of the world

Nothing lasts forever

Though a seed will grow in ash

A hawk will hunt in fire

They have died in fire

In water tanks

Scared

Alone

Or clinging to their children

It razes eveything

Tales have been told in fire

Before a battle

People have huddled from the night

Those have lost everything

A landscape decimated and bare

Fire will create its own weather

Lightning

It all can burn

Farenheit 451

Some people go through fire

And survive

Surviving is what its about

Nazis burned the dead

So many bodies

To be treated like trash

No each one an important soul

Fire will burn everything

Run from fire

While you can

Wrong place wrong time

From ash is life

From fire is life

That smile, that voice, those eyes that once seen me,

have looked and spoke with a kiss,

your hand in mine, we faced the storm,

we faced the fires and the darkness In search of bliss,

and then your were gone,

submissive to a strangers flirtatious

wish.

A wrigley stick of dynamite with a burning aftertaste.

A Marlboro man dipping his tongue into a burning lake.

Twenty bullets aimed at the chamber of your heart.

Flavorless leaves,sizzle like an overcooked smoked pop tart.

Nicotine tattoos,a needle through your lung.

Once an inhaling and exhaling apparatus,now Self will has come undone.