spontaneous human combustion

It happened to me. I was there. Out

past the factory, where

whole pleasure could be pried
open with an impulse and a wrench. The strange

cowboy of him, chains
and leather and mascara.
I was a keychain, some patchy fog.
The noise of the neural system seemed
to be coming from the stars.

Oh, the wren brought those kisses down from heaven.
A screech owl brought them up from hell.
O earth, wind, water, this

is a simile not satisfied by fire —

Still, if he’d doused me in kerosene that night
I could not have burned better or brighter.

Photo by Andy Watkins on Unsplash