The Little Man In The Fire Hates Me Poem by G.C. Waldrep

There is not so much water here as pollen.
A lesson in obedience, in Victorian industry:
I am busy, busy therefore the child will live.
Sheets blossoming like crucified roses.
I beg the silk of a single petal. Am denied.
You will not need this currency for your particular journey.

I return to the stove.
The boiling pot is neither abstract nor demure.
It is hissing its elementary decalogue.

True: I am embarrassed by the fact of the book.
False: I regret it.

Sometimes I linger, sometimes not.
No cries come from the next room.
But I am still trying to believe. The incarnation, the thrust.
And what becomes of that other.
Exhausted. Viviparous.
Salt rising like a buzz from the invection.
A lowering.

Everyone wants to fuse a tragic story to his own, after the fact.

bergamot, turk's cap, spiderwort, yarrow, foamflower
(fire-pink dying—
(pink orchids, where you waited—

There is a third cell in the eye that witnesses to the light.
When voice fails, the body substitutes.