"All You Do Is Burn" - 06/01/17

I 
Every time I get a tooth ache or a piercing infected or wake up with a random bruise
I find myself poking, prodding, playing with the source, as if i can make the pain ooze
out on command, feel it all when it's convenient and leave it when it's not, use
up all the sensation when it's under my control so I never have to worry I'll lose
that little bit of confinement that keeps every flare from sparkling the nearest fuse.

II
You're playing with fire like Portia:
pretending that coals don't hurt ya,
that holding this rage won't burn ya,
that there's no stopping your inertia.

After everything you overcame,
scorched and charred and torn and maimed,
still blazing forth, still in the game,
they'll remember this when they speak your name:
Prometheus couldn't hold your flame.

III
How many rhymes
and how many lines
and how many songs
played how many times
do you think it will take
to erase
the sores on your mind
and stifle the flame lit
by your pain
enough to recage it,
enough to contain it?
For how many days
and in how many ways
and with how many
ambiguous things you say
do you think you can
hold off the decay
of your delicate,
flammable veins?
Is your blood red
from oxygen
or the magma held
just below your skin?

IV
"All you do is burn."
"All you do is burn."
"All you do is burn."
"All you do is burn."
"All you do is burn."

"All you do is burn."

Nuclear Fusion Reactor - 02/15/17

Tell me how you lit a spark
in this sea of gluons and quarks
and sent these protons scattering
at relativistic energies,
colliding into something
new.
Hydrogen to deuterium,
iron down to helium,
each radiated positron, neutrino, or neutron
that keep the reaction going on
can't compare, no, they've got nothing on
you.

Tell me how you lit a spark
in this cold brown dwarf star of a heart,
reignited this reaction,
filled my life with passion, and
changed my course like diffraction
of light.
You are color-confinement, simply captivating;
radiant, like electrons decelerating;
your smile seems to keep time dilating
my nights.

I'm warm, I'm soft, I'm bright,
and I think I might just be alright,
each time you call me "Starlight."

The Universe Says Goodnight - 01/11/17

These bitter bites
don't belong buried
among the bright blossoms
that bloom here now.
Be free,
coarse tension,
clenched jaw,
caged breath.
Let limbs and eyelids
fall like
lilting lullabies
while lingering sorrow is lifted.
Leave it in the past.
No supernova stirs the skies,
no comet crashes,
no nebula nips at nearly-napping minds,
not a photon falls out of place.
Release your weariness and sleep.